TORY MP Dominic Grieve has accused Boris Johnson of using rhetoric which has led directly to death threats against him.
The former attorney general, who is a Remain supporter, also said the Prime Minister was “behaving like a demagogue”.
The MP for Beaconsfield revealed an arrest had been made in relation to a death threat made against him “quite recently”.
Johnson was criticised last week after branding MPs working with the EU to prevent Brexit as “collaborators” – a term which was used for people who cooperated with the Nazis during World War Two.
In an interview on BBC’s Good Morning Scotland, Grieve said the use of such language by Johnson had a direct link to the threats he received.
He said: “I want to save the Tory party from the likes of Mr Johnson – he’s hijacking it and taking it in directions which I find extremely worrying.
“I don’t like the rhetoric, after all, the rhetoric leads straightforwardly to the death threats which I receive.
“And this seems to me that the language he’s using is not that of what I would expect of a Conservative Prime Minister.
“We have a deeply divided country – I think we have to accept that – and we are not going to resolve this problem by the sort of tub-thumping populism which he’s trying to espouse.
“He’s behaving like a demagogue, but I don’t think we should be surprised about that given his track record.”
He added: “If leading politicians, particularly whipped up by sections of the press, use emotive language – collaborator is an obvious one – or call people traitors, you immediately start to receive really vile emails communications from members of the public, and some of them contain death threats.
“There aren’t a huge number, but I have to pass those over to the police.”
Grieve said he would be willing to head up a government of national unity to stop a No-Deal Brexit, but added he was “not pushing himself forward for it”.
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