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Whilst we all may have different views of the Phil, here are his words, that to me, sum him up: Celebrities To pop star Tom Jones in 1969: ‘What do you gargle with, pebbles.’ More on Tom Jones: ‘It's hard to see how he is popular. He sings the most hideous songs.’ On Elton John, in 2001: ‘I wish he'd turn the microphone off.’ To Elton John in 2001: ‘So it's you that owns that ghastly car is it?’ On hearing Madonna was to perform in 2002: ‘Are we going to need earplugs?’ His job Visiting Canada, 1969: ‘I declare this thing open, whatever it is.’ Visiting Canada in 1976: ‘We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves.’ Shouted to the Queen during an official visit to Belize in 1994: ‘Yak, yak, yak; come on get a move on.’ To an RAF photographer at a Battle of Britain commemoration, 2015: ‘Just take the f***ing picture.’ On his 1986 tour of Beijing, and his impression of Stoke-On-Trent in 1997: ‘Ghastly.’ To survivors of the Lockerbie terrorist atrocity, in 1993: ‘People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still drying out Windsor Castle.’ On opening the new British Embassy in Berlin in 2000: ‘It's a vast waste of space.’ His family On Prince Andrew and Fergie’s extravagant house in 1988: ‘It looks like a tart's bedroom.’ On a 1974 IRA kidnap attempt made against Princess Anne: ‘If the man had succeeded in abducting Anne, she would have given him a hell of a time while in captivity.’ On Princess Anne: ‘If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she's not interested.’ To the Queen on her coronation: ‘Where did you get that hat?’ On Prince William’s desire to drop out of university: 'He needs to knuckle down and not wimp out.’ To Princess Di on her anguish over Prince Charles’ infidelity: ‘I am quite ready to concede that I have no talent as a marriage counsellor.’ The marginalised During the British economic downturn of 1981: ‘Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed’. On mental health care in the modern armed forces, 1995: ‘We didn't have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking “Are you all right? Are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?” You just got on with it.’ Talking to a deaf couple who were standing near a live band in 1999: ‘Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf.’ To a young child who said he wanted to go into space, in 2001: ‘You're too fat to be an astronaut.’ To a blind woman in 2002: ‘Do you know they're now producing eating dogs for anorexics?’ To a disabled pensioner in a motor scooter, 2012: ‘How many people have you knocked over this morning on that thing?’ To an elderly man at the Charterhouse almshouse, 2017: ‘You look starved.’ Racism and cultural insensitivity: At 1986 WWF event: ‘If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.’ During a visit to Scotland in 1995: ‘How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?’ To school children in Cardiff in 2012: ‘You must have really good brains to speak Welsh.’ Referring to a fuse box during a 1999 factory visit: ‘It looks as if it was put in by an Indian.’ Talking to a British student in China in 1986: ‘If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed.’ Taking a gift from Kenyan woman in 1984: ‘You are a woman, aren't you?’ Speaking to a British man in Budapest in 1993: ‘You can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly.’ Speaking to a wealthy Cayman Islander in 1994: "’Aren't most of you descended from pirates?’ Speaking to fellow visitors to Papua New Guinea in 1998: ‘You managed not to get eaten, then?’ To an indigenous Australian business person, in 2002: ‘Do you still throw spears at each other?’ In France, 2002: ‘The French don't know how to cook breakfast.’ Sexism: To a Scottish female politician, regarding tartan: ‘Do you have a pair of knickers made out of this?’ ‘British women can't cook’ (1966). To a female council worker wearing a dress which featured a prominent zip, 2012: ‘I would get arrested if I unzipped that dress.’ On marriage: ‘When a man opens a car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.” Australia: On refusing to touch a koala in 1992: ‘Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease.’ Himself On turning 90 in 2011: ‘Bits are beginning to drop off.’ On the Queen’s choice to name her children Windsor, rather than Mountbatten: ‘I'm just a bloody amoeba.’