By IANS,
London : A well-known British journalist has admitted in a book extracted Sunday that he thought the late mother of Britain’s reigning monarch was a “ghastly old bigot”.
Edward Stourton, long-standing presenter of the BBC’s flagship radio news and current affairs programme Today, has made the comments in a book on political correctness extracted in The Sunday Times.
In his book, Stourton said the Queen Mother told him about a European summit in the 1990s: “It will never work, you know.”
Asked what would never work, she said: “The EEC (European Economic Community). It will never work with all those Huns, wops and dagos.”
All three are regarded as racist terms, Huns used for Germans, wops for Italians and dagos for Italians and Hispanics.
Stourton 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, the paper reported that Stourton said this weekend that he may have been too harsh on Queen Elizabeth II’s mother in his book, titled “It’s a PC World.”
“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,” he said.