It is quite an achievement for a BBC presenter to make the late Queen Mother the villain of a book - and get away with it. Edward Stourton manages to do so, however. On page two of It's a PC World, the broadcaster describes how, during a private lunch at Windsor, the former Empress of India anachronistically informed him that, “The EEC will never work with all those Huns, Wops and Dagos.”

Stourton tells us he was “shocked” by the “nasty and ugly” language employed by his implausibly ancient royal host, although I imagine that a large number of Britons of that vintage - who had experienced the loss of relatives in two world wars - might have expressed a similar view.

Not the least of the frustrations of this occasionally muddle-headed book is that Stourton does not tell us what he said in reply to the old lady, though tantalising us with the observation that he had “a terrible sense-of-humour failure”. Perhaps he just said, “Yes, Ma'am.”

Stourton, it turns out - and despite choosing a title that might have been designed to attract Daily Mail readers - is very much on the side of political correctness. At the end of the book, almost 250 pages after his traumatic encounter with the matriarch of the nation, Stourton concludes that, “PC may not be a properly formulated political programme, but it is in the best sense of the term a liberal dream, an expression of the conviction that the world can be made a better place.” That would be in contrast to the worst sense of the term, which presumably involves plans to make the world a less good place.

To be fair to Radio 4's Today programme presenter, he also expresses a proper journalist's concern that PC is too often a mechanism to constrain robust self-expression. He talks of the “vague sense of being bullied” as he goes about his work for the BBC, which is an organisation almost pathologically obsessed with appearing “inclusive”. The answer to such bullying, of course, is to fight back, rather than moan about it.

Stourton's own contribution to this battle is a beautiful and elegiac passage about the joys of shooting game birds for pleasure. Obviously that's what he should have been discussing with the Queen Mother over the gin and Dubonnet - they would then have hit it off famously. On the other hand, this book might thereby have lacked its solitary revealing anecdote.

Oh, there's also Ann Widdecombe MP, refusing to accept the modern unisex term “chair” instead of chairman, with the remark, “I am not a chair, because no one has ever sat on me.” Actually, even if someone had risked sitting on the interestingly shaped Widdecombe, that would not have meant she was a chair.

Pedantic, I know, but since the debate about political correctness is so intimately bound up with the use of language, we should demand high standards of its disputants. In this context it is a pity that Stourton, who is a highly intelligent and educated man, scarcely touches on the fundamental argument over whether the imposition of new terms to describe people and races actually changes the way we think about them: that is to say, would the Queen Mother have begun to reflect more warmly about our European cousins if she had been prevented by convention from referring to them as “Huns, Wops and Dagos”?

It is equally odd that Stourton, while touching on George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language, does not mention the great English journalist's principal contribution to this debate: the invention of “Newspeak”, with its concomitant felony, “thoughtcrime”.

For it is the sense that we are being manipulated by official jargon into thinking about things in their approved fashion that makes so many use “political correctness” as a term of abuse. Some of our more intelligent comedians have been among the fiercest opponents of the current government's efforts to sanitise our language: Rowan Atkinson was in the forefront of the battle against new Labour's plans to introduce a law against “incitement to religious hatred”. As Atkinson observed, this could have a chilling effect on purveyors of political satire, especially given our constabulary's predisposition to think that the PC in their title actually stands for “politically correct”.

Stourton, in fact, is at his most perceptive when he observes that political correctness is most manifest in countries that have had a strong Puritan tradition - namely America and this country: those ironclad Protestants were not known for their appreciation of comedy, in any form.

As a cradle Catholic, Stourton would see himself as far removed from that grimly humourless culture - which makes me wonder: did it not occur to the then diplomatic editor of ITN that Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother might have been having a little politically incorrect joke at his expense?

It's a PC World by Edward Stourton
Hodder £14.99 pp272

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