I'm sorry, says PM policy chief Oliver Letwin, who blamed black communities' 'bad moral attitudes' for 1980s riots

David Cameron's policy chief has apologised after finding himself at the centre of a racism row sparked by a secret memo he wrote 30 years ago.

Oliver Letwin said he apologised "unreservedly" for blaming "bad moral attitudes" of black people for inner city riots in the 1980s.

He admitted that parts of the private memo written to Margaret Thatcher in the aftermath of rioting across the country were "badly worded and wrong".

In the briefing to Mrs Thatcher note he prepared when he was Downing Street aide in 1985, he claimed that white people were not prone to disorder and suggested a scheme to foster black entrepreneurs would result in them investing in “discos and drugs”.

The document was prepared for Mrs Thatcher in November 1985 ahead of a meeting on inner-city youth in the wake of the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham that year.

The country had been shaken by riots in mostly black urban areas, including Brixton and Tottenham, where PC Keith Blakelock was murdered.

In the five-page memo, Letwin denounced proposals to put money into improving facilities in riot-hit neighbourhoods by arguing that rioting in London, Liverpool and Birmingham that year had been due to “bad moral attitudes.”

It suggested that investment in inner cities would result in vandalism and further unemployment unless “better character” were instilled in communities.

The document, written by Mr Letwin and the former MP Vernon Hartley Booth when they were both members of the No 10 policy unit, is initialled by Mrs Thatcher and appears to show her underlining key passages.

It read: “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 on anything like the present scale...

“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."

The memo was discovered in files released yesterday under the former 30-year rule by the National Archives at Kew.

After the document was made public, Labour demanded an apology from Mr Letwin for his “ignorant and deeply racist” views.

Tom Watson, the Labour deputy leader, said: “Oliver Letwin’s comments are evidence of an ignorant and deeply racist view of the world. A great many people will be asking whether, as a government minister, he still holds such offensive and divisive views.”

While former shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna, whose Streatham constituency includes parts of Brixton, said: “The attitudes towards the black community exhibited in the paper are disgusting and appalling.