Ken Clarke waves as he arrives at 10 Downing Street, London in 2010. (File photo by Reuters)

The UK is dangerously close to elected dictatorship under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is impatient toward constitutional constraints and gets angry if the courts of parliament try to interfere, a veteran Tory has warned.

In a revelatory interview with The New European on Thursday, Ken Clarke, a member of the House of Lords, branded the prime minister’s handling of Brexit as laughable and dreadful and warned that his failures were set to mark the biggest long-term scarring on the nation, causing a slump in the UK’s GDP twice as bad as the pandemic impact.

As the elected prime minister, he thinks he should not be impeded... We are now getting dangerously close to the ‘elected dictatorship’ that Lord Hailsham, the former Lord Chancellor, warned us about half a century ago, Clarke said.

The veteran politician lashed out at the UK’s lack of a written constitution and said, We have got to the point where we need a serious written constitution. We are at the absurd point where it is up to the government whether extremely contentious pieces of legislation get to be debated at all.

The former cabinet heavyweight criticized Johnson’s party as more nationalist than at any time in my lifetime.

He said global Britain was a slogan and an excuse for spending money on a royal yacht and flying the flag in odd places. We have to get used to our reduced role in the world, he added.

Clarke confirmed that the PM had been trying to tear up his Brexit agreement while trying to find a way in order to blame it on the French.

The UK and France have been at odds recently over a couple of issues such as immigration and fishing rights.