Army race remarks 'not offensive'

Mr Mercer was asked to step down as a home affairs spokesman

The Tory home affairs spokesman sacked over comments on race in the Army said nothing "that was remotely offensive", former chancellor Ken Clarke has said.

He told the BBC that Patrick Mercer could return to the front bench "when the dust settles".

But he had shown a "lack of care" and had to be dismissed, Mr Clarke added.

Mr Mercer, an ex-colonel, was asked to quit after he said he had met "a lot" of "idle and useless" ethnic minority soldiers who used racism as a "cover".

Last week, Mr Mercer, who spent 25 years in the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters regiment, said in a Times interview: "If someone is slow on the assault course, you'd get people shouting: 'Come on you fat bastard, come on you ginger bastard, come on you black bastard.'"

'Cameron right'

He also said: "I came across a lot of ethnic minority soldiers who were idle and useless, but who used racism as cover for their misdemeanours."

Mr Mercer was asked by Conservative leader David Cameron to resign as homeland security spokesman and did so.

Mr Clarke told BBC One's Sunday AM show: "There's nothing that Patrick said actually that was remotely offensive or racialist.

"He perhaps just shouldn't have gone on quite like that with a certain lack of care.

"David was quite right to have taken him off the front bench or we'd all have been talking about racialism for the past week and I trust there isn't any in the Conservative Party."

Mr Clarke, whose Rushcliffe constituency in Nottinghamshire borders Mr Mercer's Newark seat, added: "I trust that Patrick will be on the backbenches for a bit and will come back when the dust settles."

Mr Mercer told BBC One's Politics Show that, because of the way his comments had been reported, had Mr Cameron kept him in his post, it would "have made him look as if he was condoning the views that apparently I condoned. Not true, but apparently.

"Now I can't see what else he could have done."

'Eventually'

Shadow home secretary David Davis told ITV1's The Sunday Edition: "You have to be very careful you don't say something you don't intend. That's part of the skill of politics.

"If you make mistakes in politics sometimes the consequences can be very fierce, and he has paid the price, he has lost his front bench job.

"I don't think anybody should ever see Patrick Mercer as a racist. If there is an opposite of racist, that's Patrick."

Asked whether he would like to see Mr Mercer back on the front bench, he replied: "Eventually, yes."

Mr Mercer has previously accepted his comments might have "hurt" soldiers who served with him and "embarrassed" his party.

But he said he had been reporting what he had seen going on in the army.