UK newsPrincess Michael defends breeding, Botox - and Harry
She is famous for putting her royal foot in it. But even by the standards of the Windsor family's most erratic member, Princess Michael of Kent's latest pronouncements are likely to provoke a sharp intake of breath around the Buckingham Palace breakfast table.
During a chat with a German newspaper conducted over toast and hot chocolate in her Kensington apartment, the princess defended Prince Harry over his Nazi fancy dress, appeared to bemoan breeding between the classes and revealed that the Queen's party piece is her mock cockney accent.
"The English take the breeding of their horses and dogs more seriously than they do their children," she told Welt am Sonntag. "God forbid that the wrong drop of blood should get into their labrador. But their children marry everywhere."
The princess insisted she had nothing against princes and princesses marrying commoners - "The world is changing," she noted - but she wondered whether an old-fashioned arranged marriage might not work better.
Asked how Harry could have been allowed to go to a fancy dress party dressed as a Nazi, the Austrian-born princess, whose father had connections with the wartime Nazi party, replied: "I don't know."
She added: "The wretched thing is that no one said anything, although we in the royal family could scarcely complain about not being accompanied. If Harry had worn a hammer and sickle, nobody would have got excited. Even though the hammer and sickle stands for Stalin and gulag and pogrom and devastation. The press has a different sensibility because of its ownership structure."
"I feel sorry for Harry," she added.
The princess's remarks about the ownership of the British press have raised eyebrows in Germany. One newspaper accused her of anti-semitism after the interview appeared over the weekend.
"What did the lady mean? Does Mrs Kent see Jews everywhere?" the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung wondered.
The princess also confessed that she was a fan of Botox: "I've been using it for five years. Everybody over the age of 25 should take it."
She added that the Queen was a gifted mimic who could do cockney and Norfolk accents. "The Queen is distant towards strangers. But with friends and family she can be very funny," she said.
Princess Michael of Kent appears incensed by the ban on hunting, but unlike other royals, is prepared to say as much.
"I can't understand how this old English tradition can be banned. You have to ask yourself seriously: does this government really want to do things or is it more interested in class struggle?"
This is not the first time the princess, who is married to the Queen's cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, has expressed views that have got her into trouble. Last year she allegedly told a group of black diners in a New York restaurant that they should "go back to the colonies" - a claim she denied.
The Kents, who perform no public duties, have been accused of sponging off the state.
In 2002 the Queen agreed to subsidise her and her husband's previously rent-free apartment in Kensington Palace to the tune of £800,000 for the next seven years.
In the interview the princess defended her use of the flat, which, she said, the Queen had given her and her husband as a wedding present. "That didn't suit some people in parliament. So in five years we will have to move out," she said.
Last night the princess's spokesman, Simon Astaire, denied she was in any way anti-semitic. "I'm Jewish. I've never felt the slightest suggestion of anti-semitism from this woman. She's not a racist."
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