Late Queen Elizabeth ‘refused to open airport terminal’ after relative stopped from boarding plane with guns
Lord Ivar Mountbatten revealed what the monarch quipped when he was banned from taking his guns on a flight
The late Queen Elizabeth refused to open an airport terminal after a relative on his way to see her at Balmoral was stopped from boarding a plane with his guns, it has been claimed.
Lord Ivar Mountbatten, a first cousin once removed of Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh, revealed he was prevented from taking his shotguns on a flight from Bristol to Aberdeen.
He told Gyles Brandreth’s Rosebud podcast how a “sweet check-in lady” told him the hold was accessible from the cabin so they would not be secure, despite him telling a manager: “The Queen’s sending me a car and she’s expecting me for tea.”
In the end, his guns were left in the police armory at the airport and Lord Ivar took the flight to Scotland to join the Queen for the shooting weekend in the Highlands.
Later that day at Balmoral, when he recounted the tale to the Queen, it led to her “getting rather irritated” and dispatching her equerry to arrange transportation of the guns, Lord Ivar said.
The aristocrat, who is also Elizabeth II’s distant cousin, told Brandreth: “She said…’I would like Lord Ivar’s guns to be up here tomorrow morning. Please see to it’.
“Whereupon she turns back to me and she looks at me over her glasses with a glint in her eye and she says, ‘They want me to open their new terminal’. She says, ‘I don’t think I will now’.”
Lord Ivar added: “So every time I go back to Bristol Airport now, it was opened by the Princess Royal, I have a quiet laugh to myself.”
Anne first opened a terminal building at Bristol Airport in 2000, and later opened a terminal extension in 2015.
Lord Ivar, whose great-uncle was Earl Mountbatten, this year appeared in the third season of the reality show The Traitors US.