Revealed: How Joe Biden's mother hated England so much that she refused to sleep in the Queen's bed

Joe Biden’s mother disliked the English so much she decided to spend a night on the floor rather than risk using a bed the Queen might once have slept in, it has been claimed.

According to Georgia Pritchett, a British TV writer, Mr Biden recounted the anecdote when they met at the White House when he was vice-president.

Ms Pritchett wrote in her autobiography that Mr Biden had just returned from a visit to Ukraine when they met.

Their initial discussion about Ukraine, for which Mr Biden had been given responsibility by Barack Obama, was ended by White House aides.

She wrote: "Noticing I was English, he changed the subject to how much his mother hated the English.

"His parents were Irish and she had written several poems about her hatred of the English.

"He went off to find them and returned with hundreds of poems describing how God must smite the English and rain blood on our heads.”

She then described how Mr Biden had told an anecdote about how his mother Catherine Finnegan Biden, known as Jean, once travelled to the UK and stayed in a hotel where the Queen had previously done so.

Ms Pritchett wrote: "She was so appalled that she slept on the floor all night, rather than risk sleeping on a bed that the Queen had slept on."

The writer met Mr Biden when she was carrying out research for the TV comedy "Veep," about a fictional hapless vice-president, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

She also worked on the hugely successful TV projects "The Thick of it" and "Succession".

Her autobiography "My Mess is a Bit of a Life" was published in June last year and included the description of her meeting with Mr Biden.

It received renewed attention after being highlighted by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spokesman, in an article for The New European this week.

Mr Biden traces his ancestral roots back to Ireland and has often spoken fondly of them.

His great-great-grandfather arrived from Ireland to Scranton, Pennsylvania in the wake of the potato famine.

His mother, a devout Catholic who died in 2010, has been described as a "profound" influence on him.

When he was in school she once confronted a nun who had mocked her son's stutter.

Mr Biden has recounted how his mother told the nun: "If you ever speak to my son like that again, I’ll come back and rip that bonnet off your head."

During the election campaign in 2020 Mr Biden answered a question from a BBC journalist by smiling and saying "The BBC? I’m Irish."

He seemed more positive about England when asked his thoughts by an English journalist for The Daily Telegraph.

He told The Daily Telegraph: "England still is, still is, in a special relationship [with the US]."

Mr Biden has said he is "always happy" to take a question about Ireland, and weighed in repeatedly on how it would be affected by Brexit.

In 2020 he warned that the Good Friday Agreement must not be a "casualty of Brexit," making it clear a UK-US trade deal would be dependent on that.

He said any deal between the US and UK would be contingent upon there being no "return of a hard border. Period".

More recently, an ally of Mr Biden told The Daily Telegraph he didn't want to get "mixed up" in the issue.

A source said: "There is this sense of closeness with Ireland. But his officials never wanted [him] to get mixed up in Brexit, you only get into trouble.

"It is a tightrope for him. Obviously, he wants to have a good relationship with the EU and the UK. At the same time there's a considerable Irish American constituency here."