Michael Gove criticised over racist and homophobic language in student speeches

Cabinet Minister Michael Gove is facing criticism over racist, sexist and homophobic language he used in speeches 30 years ago.

He used a racial slur to refer to black people and made derogatory comments about gay people.

A source close to Mr Gove said the comments had been made in jest and did not reflect his own views.

In 1987, Mr Gove then president-elect of Oxford University's debating society took part in an inter-university debating competition in Cambridge.

Speaking in favour of the motion "this house believes that the British Empire was lost on the playing fields of Eton", Mr Gove used a racist term to describe black people, which was met with a shout of "shame" from a member of the audience.

He added: "It may be immoral to keep an empire because the people of the third world have an inalienable right to self-determination, but that doesn't matter whether it's moral or immoral."

In other comments, Mr Gove spoke about then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, saying: "We are at last experiencing a new empire, an empire where the happy south stamps over the cruel, dirty, toothless face of the northerner. At last Mrs Thatcher is saying I don't give a fig for what half the population is saying, because the richer half will keep me in power. This may be amoral. This may be immoral. But it's politics and it's pragmatism."

And he discussed homosexuality, describing the economist John Maynard Keynes as a "homosexualist" and saying "many of us are familiar with the fact that homosexuals thrive primarily on short-term relations".

In 1993, Mr Gove was working as a journalist for BBC television. He spoke twice during that year at Cambridge university debates.

In one speech he made a sexist joke about Lucy Frazer, then the head of the Cambridge Union who was hosting the debate and who is now the prisons minister, and said she had "done remarkably well coming as she has done from the back streets of the slums of Leeds".

Sources close to Mr Gove - now the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster - said university debates were often based on a ridiculous motion which the speaker did not necessarily agree with but had to defend.

But former Labour frontbencher Andrew Gwynne said that as "one of the most senior cabinet ministers in the land", Mr Gove had a duty to apologise for the "deeply offensive" comments.

"Times have moved on and attitudes have moved remarkably quickly - but I am not sure even in 1987 these things were acceptable.

"This isn't something you should shrug off and joke about being in the past. These are views that have not stood the test of time and he has certainly got to apologise."

In a statement, the Muslim Council of Britain said: "Michael Gove's comments are a window into the real ideology that animates a powerful cross-section of the Conservative political class.

"No wonder the Conservative party is in the state it's in today with regards to Islamophobia when its leading politicians hold such racist views."

Liberal Democrat Chief Whip Wendy Chamberlain said: "Michael Gove should be ashamed that he ever thought these things, let alone said them.

"These inappropriate and racist remarks are not befitting of a government minister, not befitting of a journalist, in fact not befitting of anyone.

"The prime minister should consider whether this is the type of person that deserves to be sat around the cabinet table. However, given Boris Johnson's own history of disgraceful remarks, I expect this will be another shameful issue he lets go unchallenged."