GOOD old Phil the Greek has been at it again. The bloke who describes himself as the world’s most experienced curtain-puller has apparently put his royal boot in it for the umpteenth time, this time for commenting to a Filipino nurse that her country must be half empty because all her compatriots are over here keeping NHS hospital wards afloat.

Don’t you just love him? Never mind the young bloods who are supposed to be making the royal family more modern and approachable by wearing hats shaped like giant pretzels among such everyday and normal antics as dressing up in Nazi uniforms and taking the odd swing at a paparazzo – just like every other callow youth on the pull on a Saturday night in high street Britain.

No, it's the old duke who has spent a lifetime making the comments that everyone else might secretly have been thinking. But we’ve all got so sucky-in-cheeks rabidly politically correct over the years and, unlike Philip, most of the time we now keep our thoughts to ourselves in deference to the thought Stasi.

That said, I do find it remarkably two-faced of the tabloid press to be the self-imposed arbiters of whether the duke has been caused offence or not with his off-the-cuff comments. People in glass houses and all that…

He really is a classic though. Remember in 1986 while on a state visit to China when he told a group of British students that if they stayed much longer they’d all be slitty-eyed? And in 1994 he asked a Cayman Islander if most of them were descended from pirates?

That was a pretty legitimate question if you ask me, like asking a white Australian if they're descended from British convicts banished from the mother country. For between 1788 and 1850 some 162,000 convicts were sent to Australia in 806 ships for such misdemeanours as pinching bread to feed their starving families, so the chances are yes they are.

And as for the Caymans, yes apparently the islands were a popular hideout for pirates and a base for privateers, so Philip had clearly done his homework.

He also classically described the Duke of York’s brash new house as looking like a tart’s bedroom; said Stoke-on-Trent was ghastly (well it’s not exactly pretty is it?), told Elton John his gold Aston Martin was ghastly too, said he’d like to go to Russia very much although the b*stards murdered half his family, mused to the matron of a Caribbean hospital that while she might have mosquitoes to contend with he had the Press, told a plump schoolboy he could do with losing a bit of weight, asked where the Southern Comfort was when presented with a food hamper by the US ambassador, said of his daughter, Princess Anne, that if it doesn’t fart or eat hay she’s not interested, and railed at a party “b*gger the seating plan, where’s my dinner?”

We’ve all done it, though. Dropped a verbal clanger and said the wrong thing, at the wrong time, to the wrong person, in the wrong place. I’m a master at it.

I once very inappropriately commented that my high profile publicly-recognised boss looked and acted like the commander of a Panzer tank regiment only to turn round and see a smirking journalist from The Times scribbling frantically in his notebook. Clearly not a good move for a press officer employed to protect their employer’s reputation.

There was also the occasion when I told my 80-something companion that it didn’t really matter at their age if they drank more than was good for them because they were hardly going to live long enough to suffer the long-term effects of liver damage were they? Ouch. Foot in mouth of Gulliver proportions that time.

And then there was the time I was extremely rude about little men wearing platform shoes and sporting moustaches, likening them to Seventies porn stars (not that I’d know, of course) only to be introduced to my friend’s new bloke who – yes, you’ve guessed it – was about 5ft 6in and wearing boots with lifts in them and showing off a big, thick, dark haired ’tache on his upper lip.

Clearly, like Prince Philip, my gob needs a back space.