‘Son of a whore’ x3
The sitting president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, is fed up with people criticizing the way his countrymen carry out extrajudicial killings. He called President Barack Obama a “son of a whore” for America’s criticism of the drug war which has claimed 2,400 victims in the last two months. This epithet was sufficiently offensive for Obama to cancel a planned meeting with Duterte. But the president shouldn’t be overly shocked. Duterte called Pope Francis a “son of a whore” for snarling up Manila traffic earlier this year when he visited the country. He also said the US ambassador was a gay “son of a whore”. I know what you’re thinking; this Duterte dude sounds like a sophisticate on the world stage, but he isn’t the only person to have strayed near the edges of acceptable diplomatic language.
‘A female llama surprised when bathing’
There’s a proud history of diplomatic tension between the French and the British. Whether Napoleon described Britain as a “nation of shopkeepers” or not, French statesman Georges Clemenceau spoke witheringly of David Lloyd George: “Oh, if I could piss the way he speaks!” and in similarly punchy terms, Churchill mocked Charles de Gaulle: “What can you do with a man who looks like a female llama surprised when bathing?” How Churchill came to know what that might look like is unclear, but withering putdowns of Frenchmen were once all the fashion. Lawrence of Arabia described French marshal Ferdinand Foch colourfully as “a frantic pair of moustaches”.
‘Young, handsome, and tanned’
A great one for the racist insult was the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi who in 2008 described the up and coming President-elect Barack Obama as “young, handsome, and tanned”. Making the comments after a meeting in Moscow, Berlusconi said that those who disagreed with his description were humourless “imbeciles”, adding: “How can you take such a great compliment negatively?” A year later, Berlusconi met the Obamas at a G20 summit and said afterwards to the press: “What’s his name? Some tanned guy. Ah, Barack Obama! You won’t believe it, but the two of them sunbathe together because the wife is also tanned.”
‘Appalling old waxworks’
The heir to the British throne has found himself snarled in diplomatic incidents with some of the world’s major powers. Prince Charles’s 1997 diaries on the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese (title: “The Handover of Hong Kong or The Great Chinese Takeaway”) revealed that Prince Charles viewed officials as “appalling old waxworks” and labelled one Chinese handover ceremony an “awful Soviet-style” performance. Awkwardly, the Queen herself was caught by the media describing Chinese officials during President Xi Jinping’s first state visit to Britain last year as “very rude”. Worst of all, Prince Philip famously told British students on a 1986 state visit to China that “if you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed”.
‘Terrific wankerer’, ‘sadistic nurse’: Boris strikes again (and again)
All of this means that our foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, cannot even hope to win awards for undiplomatic language, however often he mentions the US president’s part-Kenyan ancestry, calls the Turkish president a “terrific wankerer”, quips that the only reason he “wouldn’t visit some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump” or that Hillary Clinton looks like “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital”. If Britain goes toe-to-toe with the Philippines, and Boris Johnson finds himself being described as the “son of a whore” then at least he knows he’s in great company.
