The Queen Mother once labelled some of Britain's EU colleagues as "Huns, wops and dagos", a BBC broadcaster has said.

Edward Stourton, who co-presents Radio 4's Today programme, said the comments were made to him by the royal in the early 1990s after he returned from covering a European summit.

The story is recounted in a book published this week by the journalist - It's A PC World.

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The broadcaster said the comment left him thinking the "nation's favourite grandmother" was a "ghastly old bigot".

Mr Stourton, writing in his book, said after being told of his European visit, the Queen Mother said: "It will never work, you know ... It will never work with all those Huns, wops and dagos."

Mr Stourton added: "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."

In his book the broadcaster broadly welcomes the advent of political correctness and describes himself as a "recovering male chauvinist pig".

He describes in his book that "The first recorded modern use of the phrase is thought to be by the radical African-American writer Toni Cade in 1970".