Scruton says his comments in interview were presented in such a way as to cause scandal

A conservative philosopher who was sacked as a government housing adviser after he appeared to make antisemitic statements and denied that Islamophobia was a problem has claimed he is the victim of a witch-hunt and an attempt to silence voices such as his.

Speaking about his sacking from his unpaid job after a magazine interview, Roger Scruton said he did not believe he had spoken “intemperately” but his comments had been presented in such a way as to “cause some kind of scandal”.

He listened back on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to segments of a recording of the original interview with the New Statesman, which has come under pressure from conservatives. They have insisted a quote that “each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing” was part of a longer discussion by Scruton about the power of the Chinese state to impose its will on citizens, rather than racism.

Scruton told Today he had been misrepresented and made to look as if he was making a “racist slur” when in fact he had been trying to be speak about what Communist party authorities were “trying to do with them”.

However, he expressed some partial regret for his comments about how Hungarian people “were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East”.

He said that segment of the interview, in which he was speaking about his friend Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s rightwing prime minister, had not been misrepresented.

Asked if he regretted the phrase “huge tribes of Muslims,” he said: “Taken out of context it’s not a very good phrase. There is an awful lot of my phrases that I regret. I will probably regret most of the things I am saying to you now. I am hoping you will regret some of them because that is what life is about. It’s about trying to get across a point, reaching for the words, not necessarily finding the right ones.”

But Scruton appeared to be uncomfortable when other, past controversial comments were put to him, including a claim that there was “no such crime” as date rape.

“When I say there is no such crime as date rape I am saying what is true,” he said. “There isn’t a specific legal category of date rape and I wanted to make that point in order to ensure that people don’t use this to obscure the difference between real sexual violence and, you know, things that have gone wrong.”

Scruton said he was “not very impressed” with his sacking from the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. He said: “I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view. There has been throughout this country and throughout Europe really an attempt silence the conservative voice. We get identified, caricatured and then demonised and made to look as though we are some kind of sinister, fascist, racist kind of people.

“As soon as the Conservative party sees us being demonised in this way they rush to disassociate themselves from us. This happened, so I gather, on social media, all kinds of MPs saying ‘oh he is not one of us’, and there I am, out in the cold … my only fault having been trying to defend them.”

A dirty tricks row has broken out between the New Statesman and the Spectator over how the latter came into possession of a recording of the former’s interview with Scruton.

After Scruton was sacked, the New Statesman deputy editor, George Eaton, who wrote the article, exacerbated the situation by posting a picture on Instagram of himself posing with a bottle of a champagne, captioned: “The feeling when you get rightwing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser.” He later apologised for the post but said he stood by the content of the interview and how it had been written.

This week’s cover story in the rightwing Spectator, headlined “Anatomy of a modern hit job”, quotes at length from a full recording of the interview obtained by the story’s author, Douglas Murray, prompting serious concerns at the New Statesman office over how its rival obtained the tape.