The Duke of Edinburgh was accompanying the Queen on a Royal visit to an East End community group this afternoon, when he reportedly asked the female members “who do you sponge off?”
A member of the Chadwell Heath Community Centre in Dagenham, Nusrat Zamir, told media: “The Duke said to us, ‘who do you sponge off?’ We’re all married, so it’s our husbands.”
The 35-year-old added: “He also said to us, ‘do you meet to have a gossip?’ It’s a familiar question, a lot of people say what the Duke said, but we do a lot of work. When we organised a fair in March that took a lot of organising and time.”
While the women were said to have taken the 94-year-old’s embarrassing comments ‘in good spirits’, many have been left shocked by them.
Of course, this isn’t the first time the Duke’s ill-judged comments have come in for scrutiny. He famously once declared that “British women can’t cook” and described works from an Ethiopian art exhibition as looking “like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons”.
