Forget the Royals’ stiff upper lip! Zara Phillip’s husband Mike Tindall certainly didn’t disappoint during a recent live podcast appearance, cracking jokes about two exiled Royal Family members.
Breaking the unspoken code of silence, the 47-year-old former rugby pro took direct aim at both Prince Harry and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor with a couple of cheeky quips during a chat with his podcast co-hosts James Haskell and Alex Payne.
“When he was fun”: Mike Tindall pokes fun at Prince Harry
Zara, Harry and Mike (pictured in 2014) had a close relationship. (Image: Getty)
Reflecting on his 2011 wedding to Zara, Mike couldn’t help but take a playful dig at his cousin-in-law, Harry. While teasing his The Good, The Bad and The Rugby co-host James Haskell for behaving himself at the reception, Mike dropped a dig. “A lot of other people managed [to humiliate themselves] way better than you… [like] Harry, when he was fun.”
Zara and Mike were previously close to the Duke of Sussex, particularly before his marriage to Meghan Markle in 2018 and the subsequent fallout with the royal family. Harry is also the godfather of their daughter Lena, who is now seven.
It’s not known now whether Harry, Mike and Zara still keep in touch.
Mike has previously reflected on his relationship with the wider royal family, describing it as “easy”. In his 2024 memoir, The Good, the Bad, and the Rugby: Unleashed he said the trick to being welcomed into the royals was “simple”.
“Believe it or not, marrying into the Royal Family was pretty easy for me. They were always nice to me, and I was always nice to them. Simple really,” he wrote.
His laidback account was an obvious difference to Meghan and Harry’s account to Oprah Winfrey in 2021, where Meghan admitted the pressures of royal life led her to experience suicidal thoughts.
Mike Tindall’s dig at disgraced former prince Andrew
Andrew, pictured in 2025. (Image: Getty)
It wasn’t just Harry in the firing line during the live podcast chat. Royal Central reported that Mike was warned backstage to “maybe stay away from Andrew tonight”, but when co-host Alex Payne joked that Mike had his own bedroom at Buckingham Palace, Mike quipped, “Opposite end to Andrew though.”
He then joked about a corrective rhinoplasty he had for his broken nose, saying, “Taxpayers’ money fixed it. It’s got the royal warrant if you look inside it.”
The live show came a mere hours before it was reported that Andrew, the former Duke of York, is now being investigated over potential sex crimes.
As reported by the ABC, senior police officers have said the British police investigation into Andrew will be long and complex.
“The investigation is by necessity hugely thorough and will take time,” Oliver Wright, assistant chief constable of Thames Valley Police, told reporters on May 22. “There are a number of aspects of alleged misconduct that the investigation is examining, so we’re speaking with a range of witnesses.”
Related