Prime Minister Boris Johnson is “manifestly unfit to hold office” and needs to be forced out by his fellow Conservatives, former Beaconsfield MP Dominic Grieve has said.

Mr Grieve, who was Beaconsfield MP from 1997 until 2019, when he lost his seat to Joy Morrissey, has long been an outspoken critic of the Prime Minister.

Speaking on Sky News this morning, the former Attorney General said it is time for the Conservative Party to remove Mr Johnson from power.

He said: “Any ordinary Prime Minister, faced with this catalogue of failure and collapse and of his own misbehaviour, would have been long gone.

“This Prime Minister, by nature and temperament, is not going to go. His fingers have to be prised off the window ledge I’m afraid, and that is going to be the task of Conservative backbench MPs and they’ve got to get on with it, because if they don’t, the Conservative Party is finished.”

Speaking on BBC News yesterday, Mr Grieve said if he were deputy Prime Minister, he would be calling for Mr Johnson’s resignation and described is a “Prime Minister who is manifestly unfit to hold office and has shown this over and over again”.

He said: “If I were in position as a deputy prime minister, I’m afraid I would go and see the prime minister at lunchtime today and I would say ‘I’m very sorry but you have got to resign, and if you’re not resigning, I’m resigning from your government immediately’.

“If [Conservative MPs] cling onto him, the Conservative Party will be progressively more and more damaged. The recent by-election results show that it is incurring that damage.

“If this Prime Minister stays in office until the next general election, he is taking the Conservative Party down a hole – and frankly I think it may never recover.

“They have got to have the courage to say to him ‘time’s up, you have got to go’.”

The ex-Attorney General for England and Wales had the Tory whip withdrawn when he joined a band of rebel Conservatives to defy Boris Johnson's bid to keep no-deal on the table during negotiations with Brussels in 2019.

During crucial Brexit talks, Mr Grieve pushed for a second referendum and made several amendments to government bills to block Britain from crashing out of the EU.

He was one of 21 Tory MPs expelled from the party for opposing a no-deal Brexit.

After being kicked out of the party, Mr Grieve ran as an independent in his Beaconsfield constituency, but lost out to his Tory challenger Joy Morrissey in the General Election in December 2019.

In his speech after losing the MP role after 22 years, Mr Grieve said he would "go now to do all the other things that have been on my mind for a long time".