Everyone has those moments we’d rather leave behind, and the royal family is no different, since they have their fair share of things they’d like to leave in the past.
Prince Andrew’s disastrous Newsnight interview
Prince Andrew agreed to sit down with BBC Newsnight in November 2019. His goal was to explain his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, but things went catastrophically badly from the start. The Prince claimed he ‘couldn’t remember’ meeting one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre.
He denied her claims that she’d seen him sweating. But it got worse. When asked where he was on a particular night, Prince Andrew said he was in a Pizza Express in Woking, Surrey. It was a car crash of an interview that even had a film made about it. Andrew announced that he was stepping back from public duties shortly after.
Prince Philip crashing his Land Rover at 97
Prince Philip was still driving himself around Sandringham at the age of 97. That is, until January 2019, when his Land Rover collided with a Kia and ended up on its side. Two women in the Kia were hurt, although the baby riding with them was fine. Philip walked away without serious injuries.Â
That wasn’t the end of it because he was photographed two days later driving without a seat belt. Police spoke to him, and he later apologized to the other driver. He surrendered his license shortly after.
Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform
Age is no excuse. Prince Harry was 20 years old when a British newspaper called The Sun published a photo of him wearing a Nazi-style uniform. It was on the front page. Harry had worn it to a costume party, and he’d included a swastika armband, too.
Clarence House quickly put out an apology saying Harry was sorry for causing offense and admitting the costume had been a poor choice. His father, then-Prince Charles, apparently had some words with him. Harry later talked about it as one of the biggest mistakes of his life.
Charles and Camilla’s leaked ‘Tampongate’ phone call
It started as a private phone call in December 1989. It ended up published in transcript form in newspapers in 1993. Prince Charles and Camilla were secretly recorded having an intimate conversation with each other, even though they were both still married to other people.Â
Charles joked in the conversation about wanting to become a tampon so he could be closer to Camilla. Yes, really. The whole incident severely damaged Charles’s reputation. It’s definitely one of those moments that the current King wishes had never come to light.
The Buckingham Palace flag fiasco after Diana’s death
Princess Diana died tragically in Paris on August 31, 1997, and the whole of Britain entered several days of intense public mourning. But the royal family made a mistake. Buckingham Palace had no flag flying at half-mast, which is what traditionally happens during a time of mourning.
It technically wasn’t their mistake, as the Royal Standard only flies when the monarch is in the Palace. The Queen wasn’t there. But it still looked terrible, and the palace eventually changed course. They flew the flag at half-mast for Diana’s funeral on September 6.
Sarah Ferguson’s photographs
Sarah Ferguson was staying in southern France in 1992 when the paparazzi snapped photos of her sunbathing topless. It was an invasion of privacy, that much is true. But in the pictures, she was caught with the American financial adviser John Bryan.Â
He appeared to be kissing her toes. Ferguson had already separated from Prince Andrew by that time, but she was still the Duchess of York. It was yet another embarrassing moment for the Windsors and one they’d rather we forget.
Sarah Ferguson offering access to Prince Andrew for money
That’s not all for Sarah Ferguson. She was in trouble again in 2010 after a News of the World reporter, Mazher Mahmood, secretly filmed her during a conversation. Mahmood posed as a businessman and met her while claiming he wanted access to Prince Andrew.Â
Ferguson said she’d ‘open doors’ to Andrew if Mahmood paid her £500,000. She also accepted a briefcase containing £40,000. She apologized as soon as the story broke and made it clear that Andrew knew nothing about the arrangement. It seems even the royals aren’t free from corruption.
The Windsor Castle repair-bill backlash
Windsor Castle caught fire in November 1992 and caused enormous damage. Around 115 rooms needed to be repaired, and early figures put the cost as high as £60 million, or roughly $105 million in modern money. But who was going to pay?
The British public was outraged that they might be asked to fund the repairs through taxes, especially since the country was already in recession. The palace eventually raised money by opening Buckingham Palace’s State Rooms to paying visitors in 1993. The Queen contributed, too.
Prince Harry’s naked Las Vegas photographs
Prince Harry sure caused a lot of issues for the Royal Family. He went on a trip to Las Vegas in 2012 that led to photos of him being taken inside a hotel suite, completely naked. The pictures were apparently snapped during a game of strip billiards.
The images first appeared online in the United States, and royal lawyers warned British newspapers not to publish them due to privacy concerns. The Sun didn’t care. They published them anyway, and Harry’s crown jewels went on display.
Prince Harry being recorded using racial slurs
Video footage caused Harry a very different kind of problem in January 2009. He’d been recorded during his military training at Sandhurst a few years earlier. One video showed him talking about a fellow cadet using a racist term for Pakistani people.
Another video showed him using slurs for Arabs or Muslims. St James’s Palace issued an apology and said Harry hadn’t meant the first remark maliciously. The British Army ordered him to attend an equality and diversity course, and they added the incident to his military record.
Prince Philip’s decades of offensive public remarks
It’s not like Prince Harry was alone in making those kinds of comments, though, because Prince Philip had a habit of saying equally offensive things. He warned British students in China in 1986 that they might become ‘slitty-eyed’ if they stayed too long.Â
He asked an Aboriginal businessman in 2002 whether Indigenous Australians still threw spears at each other. Yikes. Those comments were the tip of the iceberg, however, and he made several remarks about nationality and disability throughout the decades. None of them were good.
William and Kate’s badly judged 2022 Caribbean tour
The goal of Prince William and Kate’s 2022 Caribbean tour was to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. The problems started before they’d even properly begun. Local opposition in Belize forced the duo to cancel a planned stop there, while in Jamaica, protesters called for reparations over slavery.Â
Then came the photos. Pictures were taken of the couple greeting children through a wire fence and riding in an open-top Land Rover. Critics argued these photos looked very pro-colonialism. William issued a personal statement after the trip saying that future relationships with Caribbean nations were for those countries to decide instead.
Kate’s edited Mother’s Day photograph
On March 10, 2024, Kensington Palace released a Mother’s Day photo of Princess Kate with her children George, Charlotte and Louis. Except, there was something wrong. Major news agencies like the Associated Press and Reuters withdrew the image because they believed it had been edited. It was pretty unusual for that to happen with an official palace photograph.
It only gave conspiracy theorists more ammo, as Kate hadn’t been seen in public since Christmas Day the year before. They claimed she was in a coma. She eventually made a video on March 22, stating that she had been diagnosed with cancer and apologized for the confusion. The picture was meant to calm any speculation about her health. It ended up doing the opposite.
The Prince’s Foundation cash-for-honors scandal
Things got rather awkward for one of Charles’s charities in 2021. Reports said there was a connection between Saudi businessman Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz’s charitable donations and the honor he received from the royal family. He became an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire, or CBE.
Critics argued that he only got that title, and his British citizenship, because he’d donated over £1.5 million to British charities. Michael Fawcett, one of Charles’s longest-serving aides, actually resigned from the Prince’s Foundation that November. There was a police investigation, but they closed the case without further action.
Sophie Wessex getting trapped by the ‘Fake Sheikh’
Sophie, Countess of Wessex, met a supposed Middle Eastern contact at London’s Dorchester Hotel in 2001. But as it turns out, the contact was undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, the ‘Fake Sheikh.’
He secretly recorded Sophie sharing some pretty strong criticisms about the rest of the royal family and members of the British Parliament. It didn’t take long for her comments to appear in print. Sophie had a lot of apologies to make.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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