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.”

Stourton, whose son Ivo was a close friend of Prince William at Eton, is no stranger to royal controversy. After the Queen Mother died in 2002, he said in a heated debate on the Today programme that a tabloid newspaper was “quite comfortable in the gutter” because it had published intimate details of her last moments before death.

Stourton said this weekend that he may have been harsh on the Queen Mother. “I didn’t mean to be severe,” he said. “I just thought it was a striking illustration of how our attitudes have changed.”

He added: “The Queen Mother came from a certain generation when people did talk like that.”

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