Shysters

After being told that Madonna was singing the Die Another Day theme in 2002: “Are we going to need ear plugs?”

To a car park attendant who didn’t recognise him in 1997, he snapped: “You bloody silly fool!”

To female sea cadet: “Do you work in a strip club?”

To expats in Abu Dhabi in 2011: “Are you running away from something?”

After accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991: “Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species.”

At a project to protect turtle doves in Anguilla in 1965, he said: “Cats kill far more birds than men. Why don’t you have a slogan: ‘Kill a cat and save a bird?’”

To multi-ethnic Britain’s Got Talent 2009 winners Diversity: “Are you all one family?”

To President of Nigeria, who was in national dress, 2003: “You look like you’re ready for bed!”

To deaf children by steel band, 2000: “Deaf? If you’re near there, no wonder you are deaf.”

To a tourist in Budapest in 1993: “You can’t have been here long, you haven’t got a pot belly.”

To a British trekker in Papua New Guinea, 1998: “You managed not to get eaten then?”

To Atul Patel at reception for influential Indians, 2009: “There’s a lot of your family in tonight.”

Peering at a fuse box in a Scottish factory, he said: “It looks as though it was put in by an Indian.” He later backtracked: “I meant to say cowboys.”

To Lockerbie residents after plane bombing, 1993: “People say after a fire it’s water damage that’s the worst. We’re still drying out Windsor Castle.”

On the Duke of York’s house, 1986: “It looks like a tart’s bedroom.”

Using Hitler’s title to address German chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1997, he called him: “Reichskanzler.”

To a woman solicitor, 1987: “I thought it was against the law for a woman to solicit.”

On the 1981 recession: “A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone’s working too much. Now everybody’s got more leisure time they’re complaining they’re unemployed. People don’t seem to make up their minds what they want.”

After Dunblane massacre, 1996: “If a cricketer suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, are you going to ban cricket bats?”

To the Aircraft Research Association in 2002: “If you travel as much as we do, you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort – provided you don’t travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly.”

To then Paraguay dictator General Stroessner: “It’s a pleasure to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.”

To Scottish driving instructor, 1995: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?”

At a WF meeting in 1986: “If it has four legs and it’s not a chair, if it’s got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it’s not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.”