A BBC eminence with no sense of humor



The Queen Mother was undoubtedly the most popular person in Britain for most of her life and now some nasty Leftist has tried to make himself look holier than holy by sliming her:

"Edward Stourton, the urbane presenter of the BBC's flagship radio programme Today, has admitted thinking that the late Queen Mother was "a ghastly old bigot". In a book on political correctness, he reveals the content of a private conversation with her in the early 1990s. After he told her he was back from a European summit, she said: "It will never work, you know . . . It will never work with all those Huns, wops and dagos."

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."

Source

His comment about the "twinkle" shows that he knew she was joking but it was still too much for his refined sensibilities. I can believe that she did say it. She grew up into a more robust world than we have today and was as such more likely to find slang terms amusing rather than offensive.

In case British slang is not understood by some readers, by "Huns, wops and dagos" she probably meant Germans, Italians and Spaniards.

Stourton has subsequently backed down somewhat from his comments above.