Oliver Letwin has a special talent for creating negative headlines for the Conservatives. Today they concern remarks that he made 30 years ago. The latest declassified files from the National Archive reveal that David Cameron’s chief policy adviser declared in a memo to Margaret Thatcher (who he was then advising) that the 1985 inner-city riots were caused by the “bad moral attitudes” of black people and that assistance for unemployed youth would end up “in the disco and drug trade”. Rarely in recent political history has there been a more unambiguous demonstration of racism.
Along with fellow aide Hartley Booth, Letwin wrote: “The root of social malaise is not poor housing, or youth ‘alienation’, or the lack of a middle class. Lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order or anything like the present scale; in the midst of depression, people in Brixton went out, leaving their grocery money in a bag at the front door; and expecting to see groceries there when they got back.
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