Just months after wearing a racist brooch to meet Prince Harry’s fiance Meghan Markle, Princess Michael of Kent has been caught out in a less than flattering situation once again.
In a recent interview for Vanity Fair, Aatish Taseer, an ex-boyfriend of the royal’s daughter, Ella Windsor, opened up about his experience as an almost-royal family member and the unpopularity of Princess Michael, who was “famously scandal-prone”.
In the piece which gives an “outsider’s view inside Kensington Palace,” Aatish claimed that the 73-year-old royal owned two black sheep, which she named Venus and Serena, after the champion African-American tennis stars.
He wrote: “Princess Michael, though generally free of British colonial prejudices, and beyond reproach when it came to me, nevertheless invited trouble out of what felt like a desire to shock: her pair of black sheep in Gloucestershire were named Venus and Serena.”
Despite her tendency to grossly offend, Aatish defended the princess and said she was, for the most part, a friendly and funny woman.
“Most everybody thought she was “perfectly ghastly, but I saw a nice side of Princess Michael,” he said. “She could be funny, intelligent, generous, and she was a lot more industrious than the other royals—she wrote books and decorated houses!”
Known in Britain as Princess Pushy, Princess Michael was born Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, the daughter of a former high-ranking Nazi SS officer and a member of the Czech royal family. She became a member of the British royal family when she married Prince Michael of Kent in 1978, and has been a regular fixture at royal events ever since.
Back in December, she sparked worldwide anger after donning a Blackamoor brooch to the Queen’s Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace. The term blackamoor has been used since the 1600s as a derogatory way to depict North Africans as servants in decorative arts.
Despite its racist connotations, Princess Michael wore a large blackamoor brooch to meet Meghan, who describes herself a bi-racial (her mother is African American and her father caucasian) and who has spoken about growing up watching her mother be on the receiving end of racist insults.
But the princess denied any wrongdoing and later said in a statement through a royal representative that the brooch “was a gift and has been worn many times before. Princess Michael is very sorry and distressed that it has caused offence”.
Aatish also commented on another racist controversy which took place back in 2004, when Princess Michael reportedly told a group of black customers at a restaurant to “go back to the colonies” because she believed they were making too much noise.