Lord Ivar Mountbatten, a distant cousin of the late Queen Elizabeth and a contestant on season 3 of The Traitors, says the late Queen once refused to open an airport terminal after he had a run-in with the staff.
Ivar, 62, recounted the story of how a “sweet check-in lady” at Bristol Airport would not let him bring his shotguns on a flight to visit Queen Elizabeth in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Elizabeth, who died in 2022 at age 96, was apparently so annoyed by her visitor’s delay that, as Ivar told it on the Monday, August 18, episode of Gyles Brandreth‘s “Rosebud” podcast, she decided in the moment not to open the terminal.
When the airport staff would not adjust their policy for Ivar, he said he told them, “The Queen’s sending me a car and she’s expecting me for tea.”
Ivar ultimately relented and he left his guns in the police armory at the airport before boarding his flight. He said the late Queen later sent someone back to the airport to retrieve them.
“She said … ‘I would like Lord Ivar’s guns to be up here tomorrow morning,’” Ivar recalled. “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.’”
“So every time I go back to Bristol Airport now, it was opened by the Princess Royal, I have a quiet laugh to myself,” he added.
A spokeswoman for Bristol Airport told the BBC that it was Princess Anne, not Elizabeth, who was always supposed to open the terminal.
“Bristol Airport followed royal protocol which was to request a member of the royal family to open the new terminal through the Lord Lieutenants office,” the spokeswoman said. “The Princess Royal was always assigned for our area, never the late Queen.”
Ivar is Queen Elizabeth’s third cousin once removed. He became known to American reality fans earlier in 2025 when he appeared on season 3 of The Traitors, ultimately winning the game with three other players and splitting the $204,300 prize pot with each of them.
He is also Prince Phillip’s first cousin once removed, but Ivar said Phillip was a father figure to him after his dad died in 1970.
“In later years, I would sit with him and ask endless questions about my father. It was wonderful to have someone who could tell me everything about him,” he told The Telegraph in April 2021. “Prince Philip was a wonderful listener; you could tell him anything as long as you were being honest and forthright. He was happy to listen to your thoughts. But if he had some advice he thought you ought to hear, he’d give it to you.”
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