It's Pip the Greek’s 90th birthday, so here's his Top Ten Tragic Utterances!

Despite the Irish slagging me for growing up as a ‘Subject of the British Crown’ I really couldn’t give a damn whether I live in a Monarchy or a Republic. I felt no more or less of a citizen in England than I do in Ireland, or did whilst living in the USA or Australia. Heads of State, be they King, Queen, or President, are all the same: wholly and utterly irrelevant to me. As long as I’m free to feel apathetic about them and have the right to write about how I don’t give a monkey’s fart, I’m a happy and grateful man.

I'm also a compassionate man. I feel Elizabeth II’s pain. Her hubbie the Duke of Edinburgh has been a blight on her reign, a pain in her royal pachoochy for decades. He’s a vacuum of tact; an overt racist; a vile creature of the lowest order.

So (with due thanks to the Daily Mirror’s Steve Myall) this colyoom celebrates Pip the Greek’s 90th birthday today with a Top Ten of the Tragic Utterances from the anachronistic inbred blue blood ignoramus.

10. Conciliatory as ever, as said to Atul Patel at a 2009 reception for influential Indians:
“There’s a lot of your family in tonight.”

9. Exhibiting great honesty whilst visiting the Paraguayan dictator General Stroessner:
“It’s a pleasure to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.”

8. Never one to bear a grudge, he explained to an Ambassador in 1967:
“I’d like to go to Russia very much - although the bastards murdered half of my family!”

7. Sensitive as ever in 2002, he chatted to blind Susan Edwards and her guide dog:
“They have eating dogs for anorexics now.”
(don’t laugh, it’s not funny, oh go on then!)

6. While on the only slightly offensive remarks, there’s the classic encounter in 1995 with a Scottish driving instructor:
“How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?”

5. Showing his lack of awarenss of domestic politics, to the black Conservative politician, John David Beckett, Lord Taylor of Warwick:
“And what exotic part of the world do you come from?”

4. Not even his family are safe. Of his daughter Anne in 1970:
“If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she isn’t interested.”

3. Even though he’s Greek, he seems to feel very English about France. When asked if the Queen was enjoying her trip to Paris in 2006, he retorted simply:
“Damn fool question.”

2. Almost worthy of the top spot of this disgusting chart, in 1998 Prince Philip scraped his tongue along the dregs of the barrel of poor taste when talking about smoke alarms to a mother who had just lost two sons in a house fire:
“They’re a damn nuisance. I’ve got one in my bathroom and every time I run a bath the steam sets it off.”

1. Top of this Party Pooper Pops has to be Philip's universally notorious comment to an English student in China in 1986:
“If you stay here much longer you'll go home with slitty eyes.”
Happy 90th Birthday Philip . Thank goodness we English are so different to you.