Last week the veteran Conservative MP was stripped of the party whip. Here he discusses his plans for the future

Ken Clarke is more jovial than might be expected as he reflects that he first became a Conservative MP when Boris Johnson was “a small toddler”. Johnson had not even been born when Clarke started to become active in Tory politics. He first attended a Conservative party conference as a student in 1962, where he supported Harold Macmillan’s application to join the Common Market against the fierce opposition of the imperialist wing of the Tory party.

“I was one of the students who was going around wearing a ‘Yes’ badge.”

It is a reminder that the Tories have been convulsing over Europe for more than half a century.

Never before, though, have the spasms been as violently destructive as now. After 49 years of continuous service on the Conservative benches, Clarke was one of the 21 Tory MPs who were stripped of the party whip for supporting legislation blocking a no-deal Brexit. In the history of the Tory party since the second world war, there has never been such a brutal purge.

The jazz-loving, cigar-puffing, Hush Puppies-wearing Clarke has always been a rumbustious combatant for the Tory cause. He held positions in the Heath, Thatcher, Major and Cameron governments, including stretches as chancellor and home secretary. It is a stark indicator of how unhinged the party has become by what he calls its “crazy nervous breakdown” that he is no longer entitled to call himself a Conservative MP.

Not that he has actually received any formal notification of this. “No one has officially told me that I have lost the Tory whip,” he chuckles. Perhaps they didn’t dare.

“The fault’s probably mine. I’m notorious for only using my mobile phone for outgoing calls: nobody knows my London number and I certainly don’t do anything online. So there may somewhere be an email or text message or something telling me, but I gather from the media that there’s no doubt that I’ve lost the whip. My status otherwise is completely unclear.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boris Johnson during his first prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/AFP/Getty Images

He is unsure whether he is still a member of the party. Conservative party chairman James Cleverly, when he bumped into him, admitted that he didn’t know either.

Being told that he is no longer a Tory MP by the “small toddler” – doesn’t this make him angry? “Well, mildly annoyed. I suppose I ought to be more shocked. I’m just slightly bemused. Hezza [Michael Heseltine] lost the whip in the Lords. Presumably they’ll remove it from John Major soon if he doesn’t shut up. It’s extraordinary.”

Johnson may have underestimated how many Tory MPs he would end up expelling when he made the threat. “What he was doing was going in for a purge of his opponents, in a very ruthless fashion,” says Clarke. “Whether he realised he’d have over 20 he’d be expelling from the parliamentary party, I’ve no idea. If Theresa [May] had tried to get her deal through in the same way, she’d have expelled over 40, including Boris Johnson and several members of the current cabinet. But very wisely, Theresa didn’t do that. You’re breaking up the party once you start doing that.

Boris never was a hardline Brexiter. Unfortunately, he’s surrounded himself with hardcore, ultra-rightwing, zany people

“Most Conservatives are still proceeding on the basis that once Brexit has ended, the party can be put back together again. But Boris has made the problem worse by seeming to encourage a huge surge to the right. He could wind up with a Conservative party looking like the Brexit party and still losing a lot of votes to Nigel Farage because real Brexiters prefer Nigel Farage.”

As we talk in his office in Westminster’s Portcullis House, Clarke reflects on the irony that Johnson is acting like a fanatic when he is not really a politician with any deep convictions. “He’s not committed very powerfully to anything. He’s not frightfully interested in policy. He came to see me in this room and tried to persuade me to vote for him in the leadership election. We had quite a cheery conversation, and his main point to me was that he was a one-nation Conservative. He never was a hardline Brexiter. That was a last-minute decision he made to join that side. Unfortunately, he’s now surrounded himself with hardcore, ultra-rightwing, zany people.”

If Johnson has any sense, the Tory leader will listen to those who are urging him to find a way to bring the expelled MPs back into the fold. “He makes it up as he goes along and his original tactics have now collapsed. I would strongly advise him to reverse this. Old-stagers like me are going anyway. But Philip Hammond, David Gauke and so on … it’s absurd to throw them out.”

He continues: “And don’t forget, the vast majority of Conservative MPs have, like me, already voted for a soft Brexit, most of them three times. The majority of the Conservative parliamentary party basically agree with me and they’ve demonstrated that the route they prefer is leaving with a deal. Boris accepted it. He can’t get away from the fact.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tory rebels including Philip Hammond, centre, sit on the opposition benches. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/EPA

“It’s no good Boris saying there’s fundamentally, in principle, something wrong with the outlines of the deal we’ve got, because he voted for it.”

Some are suggesting that the Tory leader might attempt to defy the legislation against a no-deal Brexit that went through the Commons with Clarke’s help and will become law this week.

“Somebody’s got to impress on him that he has to obey the law. Everybody, including the prime minister, has to obey the law. A prime minister defying a parliamentary majority, defying the rule of law, would be creating an amazing crisis.”

He suspects that the Johnson team assumed there would be no new deal with the EU and started planning for an early election the moment that he arrived at No 10. “You can tell what his pitch is going to be. It’s going to be: I really wanted a deal, I was nearly there, we were on the point of a deal and it’s all the fault of those cunning foreigners in Brussels and those awful MPs. Because what they [the government] are after is the Brexit vote. They’re obsessed with winning the votes of Nigel Farage’s party.”

Both are awful prospects, but a no-deal Brexit could cause far more damage to our future economic success than Corbyn

Some Brexit party propaganda came through the letter box of Clarke’s home a few days ago. (They may need to rethink their mailing list.) He notes that “people versus parliament”, a favourite Brexit party slogan, is now echoed by Johnson. “He’s stealing lines from Nigel Farage. He’s trying to imitate Farage.”

The Johnson electoral gamble is that the Tory seats lost because of the alienation of Remain and moderate voters will be outweighed by gains at the expense of Labour in Brexity areas of the Midlands, the north and Wales.

“Yeah, well, that was the basis on which Theresa fought the last election,” Clarke, who has represented a Nottinghamshire seat for nearly 50 years, drily remarks. “Now Boris might do a bit better, but I don’t think so because the angry, older, white working-class in the left-behind towns … I don’t think they’re going to vote Conservative in droves. [They’re] culturally very anti-Conservative.”

Clarke was attracted to the Tory party as a 20-year-old by Macmillan’s pro-European, one-nation leadership. Were he that age now, he would make a different decision. “In its present state, I would not join the Conservative party. I would not follow Boris Johnson in this wild, rightwing nationalist stuff. The party wasn’t like that when I joined.”

Other Tories of his persuasion have switched to the Lib Dems. Could he? At the age of 79, “it would be rather silly, wouldn’t it? I am so obviously a Conservative. All my friends would laugh.” He might, though, very well vote for the Lib Dems.

“I haven’t made my mind up which way I’m going to vote. It depends where Boris has taken us by then. If I was going to cast a protest vote, I would follow the Conservative tradition of voting Lib Dem.”

Even if that risked putting Jeremy Corbyn into No 10? Which will be the more terrifying prospect: Corbyn as prime minister or Johnson put back in Downing Street on a no-deal manifesto?

“Both are awful prospects, but I think a no-deal Brexit could cause far more damage to our future economic success than Corbyn.”

It is another sign of strange times that Ken Clarke, who never gave any quarter in many decades of battling Labour, can think that his own party could inflict a worst fate on Britain than a Corbyn government.