Stourton retreats on Queen Mother attack

Edward Stourton, the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, is having second thoughts about calling the late Queen Mother (pictured) "a ghastly old bigot". He made his remark in a book he's written on political correctness, called It's a PC World, which features an account of a private conversation he had with the QM in the early 1990s about the European Union.

The Queen Mother said to him: "It will never work, you know . . . It will never work with all those Huns, wops and dagos." In the book, which is published on Thursday, Stourton, who no doubt held his tongue at the time, writes: "The words were delivered with the eyes on maximum tiara-strength twinkle, but I am afraid I froze. The Nation's Favourite Grandmother was, I thought, in fact a ghastly old bigot, a prey to precisely the kind of prejudice which had driven the conflicts the European project had been designed to prevent . . . I thought that what she had said was nasty and ugly."

However, sensing a storm, Stourton now admits he might have been a little harsh on the old girl. "I didn't mean to be severe. I just thought it was a striking illustration of how our attitudes have changed. The Queen Mother came from a certain generation when people did talk like that." This backtracking might have something to do with the fact his son Ivo has been a close friend of Prince William since their Eton days.