BORIS Johnson is under mounting pressure to sack a new No 10 aide and rein in his controversial chief strategist Dominic Cummings after a row over eugenics and race engulfed Downing St.

No 10 was told to “get a grip” by Nicola Sturgeon and its approach was branded “disgusting” by Labour’s Ian Lavery after it intensified the controversy by refusing to clarify if the Prime Minister agreed with Andrew Sabisky’s “appalling” views, including a suggestion that black people were less intelligent than white people.

Bell Ribiero-Addy, the Labour MP for Streatham, tweeted: “You don’t have to believe black people have lower IQs than white people to get a job at @10DowningStreet. But it helps.”

Tory backbencher Caroline Noakes, a former Immigration Minister, who now chairs the Commons Women and Equalities Committee, also took to social media, saying: “Cannot believe No 10 has refused to comment on Andrew Sabisky. I don’t know him from a bar of soap but don’t think we’d get on…Must be no place in Government for the views he’s expressed.”

Commenting on Mr Sabisky, one Government adviser told BuzzFeed News: “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.”

Pressed repeatedly on the views expressed by the 27-year-old researcher and whether the PM agreed with them and if he condemned them, Mr Johnson’s spokesman simply said the PM’s “views are well-documented” and declined to comment on “individual appointments”.

Mr Sabisky was drafted in to No 10 after Mr Cummings called for “misfits and weirdos” to apply to advise the Conservative Government.

He is reported to have said -

*Black Americans have a lower average IQ than white Americans and were more likely to have an “intellectual disability”.

*”One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty. Vaccination laws give it a precedent, I would argue.”

*“I am always straight up in saying that women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s.”

*The benefits of a purported cognitive enhancer, which can prove fatal, were “probably worth a dead kid once a year”.

The First Minister tweeted: “These are really not acceptable headlines for any government to be generating [or allowing to be generated]. They need to get a grip fast and demonstrate some basic but fundamental values in the terms of our public debate.”

Mr Lavery, the Labour Chairman, said: “It is disgusting that not only has No 10 failed to condemn Andrew Sabisky’s appalling comments but also seems to have endorsed the idea that white people are more intelligent than black people.”

Ed Davey for the Liberal Democrats said: “When you have a Prime Minister who has referred to people as ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’, it is sadly no surprise that Boris Johnson has signed off on Dominic Cummings recruiting someone with such extreme and offensive views.”

He added: “The Prime Minister must do the right thing and put an end to the offence caused and sack Andrew Sabisky. He must also make crystal clear why he signed off on this appointment and curb Dominic Cummings’s power to appoint and sack at will.”

An SNP spokesman said: “Boris Johnson must immediately condemn these remarks, remove this individual, and make clear immediately that they do not represent the views of his government.

“Communities across the country will rightly be concerned about who Boris Johnson has in his inner circle at the very heart of Downing Street, and how individuals with such abhorrent views are hired.

“Johnson has serious questions to answer and he can begin by setting out why his government has refused to sack an advisor who holds such discriminatory, misogynistic, and racist views?” he added.

Eugenics is the study of or belief in the possibility that the qualities of human beings can be improved by either discouraging people from having babies who are deemed to have genetic defects or undesirable inheritable traits or encouraging others to have babies who are deemed to have desirable inheritable traits.