Princess Michael of Kent, the queen’s “uncomfortable” cousin

All families have an “uncomfortable” relative. The royal family makes no exceptions. The real “black sheep” responds to the name of María Cristina Inés Eduvigis Ida from Reibnitz, better known as the Princess Michael of Kent, called «pushy» for the use to do extremely haughty. Wife of the prince Michael in Kent, cousin of Elizabeth II and sixth at birth in the succession to the throne (now occupies place number 45), the seventy-six-year-old aristocrat is teacher and author of novels, has a blog on HuffPost and its own webpage, but it is especially known for its unfortunate utterances.

Born in 1945 in the Czech Republic, daughter of the Nazi Baron Gunther von Reibnitz, behind her studies in decorative arts at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Maria Cristina married the prince Michael of Kent, from whom he had two sonslord Federico e lady Gabriella – in 1978. Today she defines herself as a “writer, interior designer and art expert”. And she is the patroness of over forty institutions, schools and hospitals.

But she is best known for her faux pas. The most famous and recent dates back to Christmas 2017, during the lunch that Elizabeth II celebrates every year in Sandringham with all his family. That day, for the first time, there was also in the Queen’s Scottish estate Meghan Markle. E Maria Cristina he showed up with a gold brooch representing the bust of a black man: a piece of the sixteenth century called Blackamoor, originally from Venice, interpreted by all as a racist message to Harry’s African-American girlfriend. The princess denied, apologized, said to herself “shocked for having offended Meghan.” But the damage was now done.

It was not the first time that the princess was at the center of a racist controversy. In 2004, in a ristorante from the West Village in New York, he told a group of black customers, in his opinion too noisy, of “Go back to the colonies”. Months later he tried to make amends with an interview with ITV which instead had the opposite effect: “I once pretended to be AfricanDeclared the fearless von Reibnitz. “I even dyed my hair black. But with my blue eyes, I couldn’t“. And again: «I wanted to be a writer, travel on African buses, from Cape Town to Mozambique. I lived this adventure with these special people, absolutely adorable. Don’t call me a racist, it’s a stab in the heart. I really love these people. ” He loves them so much that according to a relative he would have renamed the two black sheep that he held a Kensington Palace con i names of Venus and Serena, like the famous tennis sisters.

The tacky princess outings aren’t just about black people. There is a little bit for everyone. In an interview granted in the United States in 2014 to promote one of his books, he did not hesitate to say that “older members of the royal family are boring“; in 2015, that “animals have no rights because they do not vote or pay taxes“. But one of his unhappy words about the princess will go down in history Diana: «Diana she was ignorant, he was unable to manage fame because he had not had a strict mother ». The “haughty princess” has a (malicious) word for everyone. Queen Elizabeth II, for her part, crushed the “uncomfortable” relative with only four words: “Too snobbish for us”.

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