Author claims Queen Mother was 'bigot'

LONDON, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- Radio presenter-turned-author Edward Stourton says in a new book he thought Britain's late Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was a "bigot."

The former host of the BBC radio program "Today" alleges in a book on political correctness that the queen consort, who died in 2002, once made a derogatory racial comment to him after he returned from a visit to Europe, The Sunday Times of London reported.

"It will never work, you know … it will never work with all those Huns, wops and dagos," Stourton quotes the late royal family member as allegedly saying following a European summit in the early 1990s.

"The Nation's Favorite 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," Stourton said in his book. "I thought that what she had said was nasty and ugly."

Stourton told the Times this weekend he didn't mean to be callous with his written remembrance.

"I didn't mean to be severe," he said. "I just thought it was a striking illustration of how our attitudes have changed."