Oliver Letwin’s ‘racist’ memo proves two things: politics change and people change

What Oliver Letwin wrote in that 1985 memo to Thatcher was ugly. But you know what is also ugly? The forced extraction of an apology from Letwin for the things he thought and said three decades ago, when the political world was a very different place. The attempt to drag Letwin’s name into the gutter for a memo he wrote in another era, when thinking on race and society was often a million miles from what it is today, has a nasty, mob-like, fatalistic feel to it.

As Letwin himself now says, his memo was wrong. He was wrong to write off the rioting in Broadwater Farm as simply a matter of ‘bad moral attitudes’, and to suggest that encouraging black entrepreneurship would inflame the ‘disco and drug trade’. But apparently it isn’t enough for him to say ‘I was wrong’; he must also self-flagellate, beg forgiveness for having caused ‘offence’ — the greatest crime of our times — and maybe even consider his political position over what Chuka Umunna describes as his ‘disgusting and appalling’ comments.