Oliver Letwin Resign

Our constituency MP's views are unacceptable to the people of West Dorset.
David Cameron’s chief policy adviser helped to ward off cabinet pleas for assistance for black unemployed youth following the 1985 inner-city riots with the argument that any help would only end up in the “disco and drug trade”.

He also warned Thatcher that setting up a £10m communities programme to tackle inner-city problems would do little more than “subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops”.

The memo also quotes Letwin referring to plans to regenerate the riot torn areas of North London, stating, “Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.”

There’s clear evidence that the beliefs he held in 1985 are still being enforced in government. In 2011, as riots again tore through the country, and as campaigners said this was a clear sign that poverty and inequality ran deep, the government responded as it did in Thatcher’s day, by claiming it was all the work of individual criminals – “those thugs”, as Cameron called them at the time.

When he was shadow chancellor, he was secretly recorded telling the Institute of Economic Affairs that he would like to slash public spending by billions but that it would be electorally disastrous to do so. Again, there was no apology, with Letwin claiming he was the victim of “a farrago of nonsense”.

In 2003, Letwin risked the Tories’ attempts to rebrand themselves as the party for ordinary working families when he claimed he would rather beg on the street than send his children to the local state school in south London. The Eton and Cambridge-educated politician conceded that he “wouldn’t mind” using a state school in his West Dorset constituency, but added that he aimed to get his 10-year-old daughter into “a particular public school in London”.

In 2004 Letwin told a private meeting that the “NHS will not exist” within five years of a Conservative election victory. Paul Boateng, then chief secretary of the Treasury, seized on the gaffe, claiming it revealed the Tories’ true intentions “to abolish the NHS as we know it”.

Mr Letwin, who is independently affluent; continued working part-time for a top City investment bank despite being a member of the shadow cabinet. Between 2004 and 2009, he claimed more than £80,000 of expenses for a cottage in Somerset close to his Dorset constituency. The property is in an isolated area and Mr Letwin claims for the cost of heating fuel and emptying the septic tank. (£4000 p.a.)

During the summer of 2005, records showed that Mr Letwin took out a second mortgage for £100,000 on his cottage. Parliamentary records also showed that he charged the taxpayer more than £1,000 in mortgage interest for the property.

He then increased the amount of mortgage interest that he wanted to claim back from the public finances by more than £300 a month, and told the parliamentary authorities that the new mortgage was to “fund repairs and improvement”. Within two days, the senior Tory telephoned the fees office to say that he had not started the work and had therefore “decided to withdraw the claim for [the] time-being”.

The most controversial claim was made in September 2006. An invoice for £2,145 was submitted by Mr Letwin for “works ... to lay a new 25mm pipeline to replace the existing leaking pipeline under the tennis court”. The contractors also charged to re-lay the “turfs ... as practical on the sensitive area [around the tennis court].”

In 2011 Letwin was branded “the most controversial politician in Sheffield” by the then deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, for allegedly saying he did not want to see more families in the city taking cheap foreign holidays.

Also in 2011 Letwin was photographed dumping official papers in litter bins in St James’s Park. The Daily Mirror reported that Letwin was seen on five separate days binning sensitive correspondence in the park. The Information Commissioner’s Office later found that while he did not dispose of any government documents; the papers were his constituents’ personal and confidential letters to him.

The latest revelations, that adds allegations of racism to his catalogue of gaffes is the last straw.

We believe it is high time he resigned as an MP.