A former Downing Street adviser of Sri-Lankan descent has accused Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, of using the N-word during a meeting with him at Buckingham Palace.
While the prince has year to formally respond, an unnamed Buckingham Palace source was cited by The Daily Mail as saying that “we strenuously deny that these words were ever used”.
Rohan Silva, an adviser to former UK prime minister David Cameron, claimed that the meeting took place in 2012, when Silva asked Prince Andrew whether the government’s Department for International Trade “could be doing a better job”.
According to the ex-adviser, the prince allegedly responded: “Well, if you’ll pardon the expression, that really is the n***er in the woodpile”.
“The meeting ended shortly afterwards, and I remember distinctly how I walked blinking into the sunshine outside Buckingham Palace, reeling at the prince’s use of language,” Silva wrote in an article for the Evening Standard.
He admitted that afterwards, “I kicked myself for not confronting the prince on his choice of words — and it's something I still regret today.”
“After all, he clearly wasn't taken to task very often by the people around him, which meant offensive language went unchallenged,” Silva added.
He also referred to an earlier conversation with the Duke of York about the European Union’s spending and whether it could be made more transparent.
“What you have got to remember, is that you’ll never get anywhere by playing the white man,” Prince Andrew said at the time as quoted by Silva, who immediately Googled the phrase.
“'The definition flashed up on my screen: an old-fashioned saying, used during colonial times, meaning that only white people can be trusted to follow the rules, unlike dark-skinned natives,” Silva wrote.
Duke of York’s ‘Lorry Crash’ BBC Interview on Epstein
This comes after Prince Andrew’s controversial BBC interview, during which he specifically admitted that he did not regret his relationship with convicted billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein as it had “seriously beneficial outcomes” for him.
The member of the British monarchy, who was photographed at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2010 and accused of having sex with one of his alleged underage victims, also said that he stayed at his then-friend house for the sake of “convenience”.
Commenting on the allegations of him having sex with Virginia Giuffre (formerly known as Virginia Roberts), Prince Andrew argued that he has “no recollection of ever meeting this lady”.
The Telegraph has meanwhile reported that Queen Elizabeth II did not approve of Prince Andrew’s decision to give the BBC Newsnight interview, described by Prince Charles’ former PR chief Dickie Arbiter as “not so much a car crash but an articulated lorry crash”.
Epstein died last August at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been held ahead of his pending trial, with the pathologist determining his death to have been the result of a suicide by hanging. The financier was charged with sex trafficking for allegedly having procured underage girls for high society patrons.
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