The Spectator’s Notes | 15 November 2008

My old friend ‘Posh Ed’ Stourton begins his new book about political correctness (It’s a PC World, Hodder and Stoughton) with an anecdote about the Queen Mother. She told him, in private, that the EEC would never work, because of all those ‘Huns, Wops and Dagoes’. Ed was displeased: ‘I thought that what she had said was nasty and ugly.’ He thinks what upset him was that the ‘ghastly old bigot’ (a bit of ageism in that description?) was expressing racist sentiments. I choose to interpret the matter rather differently. What really shocked him, I suggest, is that the Queen Mother forgot two basic points of etiquette to observe when one has the privilege of talking to members of the BBC family. The first is that one must never use rough, colloquial words like ‘Dago’ in their presence. The other is that one must never, ever speak ill of the European Union.