Former Tory minister warns of risk from cyberattack by ‘some autistic person’ in bizarre interview

Ex-MP lists people with autism among terrorists and foreign nations as threat to UK infrastructure

A former Tory minister has warned of the threat posed from a cyberattack by “autistic people” in a bizarre radio interview to promote his novel.

Sir Oliver Letwin, who lost the Conservative whip in September over his opposition to Brexit, appeared on Radio 4’s Today show to discuss his new book Apocalypse How?

The novel, which is set in 2037, imagines what would happen if a technology-dependent national infrastructure network collapsed due to an unforeseen crisis or technology attack.

“There are so many different ways that these networks could be attacked, either by nature as I picture … or a terrorist attack, or another country attacking us,” he told the BBC’s Justin Webb.

“Or in fact, just some autistic person or some strange youth sitting in some place in the world who’s connected to our network by the Internet [and] gets in and does something…”

Mr Webb, who did not challenge the former MP on his “ignorant” reference to people with autism, was met with criticism from Nicola Clark, a writer and disability campaigner.

“Hi [Justin Webb], why did you allow Sir Oliver Letwin in his #bbcR4Today book promotion interview to say completely unchallenged ‘some autistic person who gets in’?” Ms Clark wrote on Twitter.

“Why didn’t you challenge that? Conflating autism & criminality is bigoted & ignorant & required robust challenge.”

The BBC presenter replied saying he was sorry for not challenging the comment, which he did not believe was “malicious” at the time.

“Yes sorry, I hold up [my] hand — I felt in that split second that it wasn’t malicious and didn’t want to derail discussion but I can see why you’re disappointed and obviously what you say about autism is quite right,” Mr Webb wrote in response to Ms Clark’s tweet.

Sir Letwin does not appear to have commented further on the interview, which also included a bizarre exchange about a witheringly negative review of his book.

The presenter drew attention to an article by The Times’ Hugo Rifkind, who described the novel as a “disaster” and a “bizarrely mundane facsimile” of the apocalyptic fiction genre.

“Look, Hugo hated the book and maybe many readers will, I hope they read it before they decide whether they hate it or not,” Sir Letwin replied, arguing that the message of the book was more important than the quality of the storytelling.

“This is not meant to be a great novel, I’m sure it isn’t. It may well be terrible, I don’t care.”

In contrast, the Evening Standard called the book “entertaining”.