Boris Johnson has prompted outrage after he said a Libyan city could be transformed into the new Dubai once "they clear the dead bodies" away.

The Foreign Secretary’s off-colour comment drew gasps and shocked laughter from the audience at a global trade fringe event at the Conservative conference.

Theresa May was urged to sack him for his latest gaffe, which critics said proved that Mr Johnson - arguably the UK's top diplomat - was not fit to represent Britain on the world stage.

"There's a group of UK business people actually, I don't know whether you will have come across this, wonderful guys, who want to invest in Sirte on the coast, near where Gaddafi was actually captured and executed, as some of you may have seen.

“They have a got brilliant vision to turn Sirte, with the help of the municipality of Sirte, into the next Dubai.

“The only thing they’ve got to do is clear the dead bodies.”

A US professor is trying to reclaim his personal data from the controversial analytics firm that helped Donald Trump to power. In what legal experts say may be a “watershed” case, a US citizen is using British laws to try to discover how he was profiled and potentially targeted by the Trump campaign.

David Carroll, an associate professor at Parsons School of Design in New York, has discovered a transatlantic legal mechanism that he hopes will give him access to information being sought by both the FBI and the Senate intelligence committee. In recent weeks, investigators looking at how people acting on behalf of Russia targeted American voters have focused on Trump’s data operation. But although the FBI obtained a court order against Facebook to make it disclose evidence, the exact way in which US citizens were profiled and targeted remains largely unknown.

“In the US election, the FBI has been trying to get information from the top down but this doesn’t help with regard to the French election or Brexit,” Dehaye said. “And we know we just cannot trust Facebook, even with good intent, to run our elections fairly. There are a few huge companies amassing vast amounts of data on vast amounts of people and there’s no democratic oversight.”

Pasquale said news that Facebook information had been used by Russian agents to target US citizens may prove to be a tipping point. “It shows this information has now been weaponised by a state actor. What we’re seeing is really a failure of the first order. Mark Zuckerberg wrote this 6,000-word letter about creating a global political community and yet we now know that Facebook was a platform for a devastating attack on the most robust democracy in the world.”