Downing Street has refused to say whether the prime minister Boris Johnson agrees with an adviser who suggested black people were mentally inferior.
Andrew Sabisky, an adviser of Boris Johnson has made a string of controversial remarks in which the prime minister has refused to announce if he backs them or would condemn them.
In 2014, Sabisky made a blog post in which he commented on the IQ of black Americans which is now being re-circulated online.
Sabisky wrote: “If the mean black American IQ is (best estimate based on a century’s worth of data) around 85, as compared to a mean white American IQ of 100, then if IQ is normally distributed, you will see a far greater percentage of blacks than whites in the range of IQs 75 or below, at which point we are close to the typical boundary for mild mental retardation.
“That parsimoniously explains the greater diagnostic rates for blacks when it comes to “Intellectual Disability”.
When questioned on Sabisky’s comments recently, a Downing Street spokesman was unable to point to a single example of when Boris Johnson has expressed a view on the intelligence of black people, saying that reporters would find that his opinions were “well-documented” on the public record.
He then declined to say wether Mr Johnson’s views were reflected in a magazine article in which the PM referred to black people as “picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”.
Several MPs have urged Johnson to sack Sabisky, with one former government adviser saying: “Hiring this imbecile is an insult to those who came before, which is a minor point I know, but Jesus wept it makes me ashamed.”