Donald Trump's former staffer Anthony Scaramucci shocks Cambridge Union by swearing at student

US President Donald Trump's former communications director Anthony Scaramucci shocked the audience at the Cambridge Union on Wednesday night by calling the speaker a "b***h".

He made the comment after she joked about how he was fired 11 days into his job after a reporter recorded an expletive-filled conversation about his White House colleagues in July.

Introducing the prestigious public debating event, she said: "To be very clear from the start and perhaps clearer than the New Yorker, this conversation is on the record."

Scaramucci, nicknamed "The Mooch", appeared to be joking as he claimed the "spirit" of the conversation the journalist meant that it should not have been recorded and surprised the room by ending with calling the speaker a "b***h".

Asked if he believed the US will go to war with North Korea, he said he believed the threat of nuclear war would end diplomatically as Trump was a "war avoider".

"I do think that we are going to get, I believe that we will get to a diplomatic solution with the North Korean government, I do believe that.

"He is by his nature a war avoider, not a war starter and by his nature, he would have a general reluctancy to deploy troops in situations relative to not.

"That's my experience in him in private conversation, in personal conversation and my experience of him as a human being, as a father and a grandfather."

He told the Union that Trump spent a "tremendous" amount of deliberation deciding to keep American troops in Afghanistan.

He suggested the US Army had acted as a peacekeeper across the world since the World War Two, saying: "We have had roughly 71 years of peace since the second world war.

"If you think North Korea is a bad situation then Pakistan could be 70 North Koreas.

"There's a high intensity of radicalisation in that nation and that nation is equipped with nuclear weaponry."

He drew mocking laughter from the audience as he denied he was a "climate change denier", saying: "I think it's 60ish percent caused by human beings and like 40 per cent caused by where we are relative to the Sun and what kind of activities are going on."

He drew bigger laughs and applause when he added: "You've got to do more research on it."

Speaking after the event, he responded to criticism of his media company's Scaramucci Post's post on Twitter, polling people on how many victims of the Holocaust there were.

He said an Orthodox Jew from a family of Holocaust survivors had written the tweet: "Unfortunately now again, we are under a vicious microscope now where every single thing is analysed.

"He was trying to make a point, but unfortunately in our polarised society right now, points like talking about Hitler or the Holocaust are going to be met with rapid, Piranha-like activity from the press and from Twitter where they are totally going to be misconstrued and discombubulated so I thought it was a much better idea to take it down.

"But I do think we are losing some of the voice of the Holocaust and people don't know of the tragedies, but the intent was there and the intent was honest and people were calling on me to fire him, that's not real leadership.

"I think the criticism frankly was unfounded and a little bit unfair but I understand the criticism and the reason I took it down and issued a personal apology, an apology on behalf of the Scaramucci Post is because it's such a polarising, such a sensitising issue that I didn't want anybody make the claim that we were trivialising it."

He also claimed he was "not aware" that Donald Trump had been accused of being "insensitive" by telling a soldier's widow "he knew what he had signed up for".

The Mooch, who had told the Union Trump was his "personal friend", said: "I have to be honest with you I was outside the United States so I didn't hear what happened but I do know that unfortunately now in our society we are polarising even the extending of condolences to our fallen heroes. I merely just heard about it from one of the students here."

He added that he had "no criticism" of Trump and that he had last spoken to him when the president called him over the phone three weeks ago.