Tory minister says views, put forward in a book he wrote in 1999, reflect his long-held belief in equality of opportunity

Oliver Letwin insisted on Saturday that his political career had been driven by a quest to achieve equality of opportunity for the most needy, after more evidence emerged of his thinking about people living in impoverished urban communities.

The cabinet member and confidant of David Cameron has come under scrutiny after the release of a memo he wrote for Margaret Thatcher in 1985 that expressed controversial opinions about black communities in London.

Research by the Observer has shown that in a 1999 book, Letwin identified an “underclass” who he said represented “an extreme failure to contribute to the advance of beauty, truth and prosperity”.

In The Purpose of Politics, a book of political philosophy published two years after he became an MP and a year before he joined the shadow cabinet, Letwin made comparisons between “a drugged adolescent in a modern inner city” and a medieval serf.

Letwin argued that the former “shares only the values of his gang or if, as sometimes, deprived even of that solicitude, no identifiable values at all”.

What was “special and new” about the underclass, he said, was not its poverty but “the presence within our societies of a large number of persons who are fundamentally alienated from the civilisations of which those societies are the embodiments”.

Letwin said the underclass’s existence was different to that of refugees or migrants because “to be an alien in one’s own society, not to share in the civilisation, the language, the practices, values which constitute and emerge from that civilisation (and hence to be in a universal sense alienated, an alien everywhere and at home nowhere) is in its ghastliness both new and special”.

In comparing “a drugged adolescent” to “a medieval serf”, Letwin wrote: “In terms of poverty, the modern adolescent is vastly the better off of the two … But, despite these advantages compared to the serf, the drugged modern youth is – from the point of view of his relationship to his own civilisation – decisively more a stranger, an alien, than the serf.”

Letwin conceded that “many relatively impoverished young people living in the inner cities of western nations are very far from conforming to this bleak picture”, but “the description nevertheless identifies a recognisable type”.

Letwin told the Observer he stood firmly behind his characterisation of the underclass. He said: “It is misleading to quote these statements out of context. One of my greatest concerns ever since entering parliament in 1997 has been to find ways of enabling all our citizens – and in particular the most vulnerable and those caught in cycles of addiction and breakdown – to achieve equality of opportunity and a better life through full participation in the benefits of our society and civilisation.

“That is why I wrote this book in 1999, why I spoke passionately about the need to end the conveyor belt to crime when I was shadow home secretary in the early 2000s, and why I am such a strong supporter of David Cameron’s drive for social reform today.”

Letwin was accused last week of writing a racist memo when he was a member of the No 10 policy unit. Downing Street files from 1985 released by the National Archives show that a paper co-written by Letwin predicted that new, black entrepreneurs “will set up in the disco and drugs trade”.



Letwin apologised for any offence caused and admitted that parts of the memo were “badly worded and wrong”.

Labour castigated him, with Tom Watson, the deputy leader, describing the memo as “deeply racist”, while Diane Abbott, shadow secretary of state for international development, called the comments “laughably ignorant”.

Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, offered a qualified defence, however, saying that “even if you wanted to demonstrate that Tories are closet racists who haven’t changed their attitudes since 1985, Oliver Letwin is probably the worst example you could find,” though the memo was “outrageous”.

The prime minister has continued to back Letwin, who was promoted to full cabinet in May and advises on the implementation of government policy.