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Anorak News | Wop-Ho: The Dear Old Queen Mother Was The EU Embodied

Wop-Ho: The Dear Old Queen Mother Was The EU Embodied

by | 10th, November 2008

THE Queen Mother was “ghastly bigot”, says BBC presenter Edward Stourton.

Stourton, the presenter of the Today programme, has penned a book on political correctness and why we could for so long not call the Queen Mum a spoon-fed, wooden-toothed old soak and had to prefix such opinion with “The dear old is a…”

Stourton understands protocol and reveals the content of a private conversation with her in the early 1990s.

Though a BBC matter, the conversation was not conducted over the telephone and at no time can Mr Stounton be heard extolling the Queen Mum to ever greater acts of depravity while Princess Anne saddles up.

After he told her he was back from a European summit, the dear old Queen Mum said:

“It will never work, you know . . . It will never work with all those Huns, wops and dagos.”

Of course, the modern British parliament is all inclusive, and the likes of George Joachim Goschen, Michael Portillo, John Profumo, in that order. Moreover, the Princess Diana chambers were open to opne and all. (Edward, there’s a sequel in this – call me.)

Says Stourton:

“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.”

Of course what with her Anglo-German heritage and nabob-hued teeth, the dear old etc. was

“I didn’t mean to be severe,” says Stourton. “I just thought it was a striking illustration of how our attitudes have changed.”

And the fact that the dear old… is dead and a liberal white man at the BBC has a book to promote…



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