Did the Queen Mother lose Stourton his job?

So why was Ed ‘Posh’ Stourton sacked from his presenter's job on BBC Radio 4's Today programme? He pointed out in an interview at the weekend that he had put in ten years’ "unblemished service" on Today, but this isn't entirely true.

As reported here two weeks ago, Stourton attracted considerable negative publicity for the Beeb over comments he made about the late Queen Mother in his recently published book on political correctness, It's A PC World, in which he called her a "ghastly old bigot" for saying that the European Union would never work "with all those Huns, wops and dagos".

"None of that went down well. Everyone at the BBC has to be impartial," says The First Post's broadcasting source. "You can easily imagine Jim Naughtie [his Today colleague] having similar thoughts, but he would never be so foolish as to air them."

Whether this did for him or not, the news that he is to be replaced on Today next September by Justin Webb, the BBC's North American editor, raises more questions about who will present the much mooted new version of Letter From America, the long-running show presented by Alistair Cooke from 1946 until his death in 2004 aged 95. Webb was considered a front-runner for the job, but if he’s leaving America he can hardly be the man Mark Damazer, Radio 4's controller, is going to appoint. 

With Webb out of the frame, the odds get better for Tina Brown, the British-born, New York-based journalist who has edited Vanity Fair and now fronts up the US blog The Daily Beast, and Tom Brook, host of the BBC film show Talking Movies. ·