The prime minister has attacked the Extinction Rebellion activists protesting in London over the climate crisis, dismissing them as “uncooperative crusties” who should stop blocking the streets of the capital with their “heaving hemp-smelling bivouacs”.

Boris Johnson made the remarks at the launch of the final volume of a biography of Margaret Thatcher written by his former boss at the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore.

Extinction Rebellion: 280 arrested in central London protests Read more

Johnson claimed he was advised not to attend the event. He said: “I am afraid that the security people didn’t want me to come along tonight because they said the road was full of uncooperative crusties and protesters of all kinds littering the road. And they said there was some risk that I would be egged.”

Extinction Rebellion began a planned two-week shutdown of central London on Monday including many sites around parliament in protest against the lack of action to tackle the climate crisis. By 9.30pm 280 people had been arrested.

The book launch was held at the Banqueting House on Whitehall, not far from climate demonstrators on Westminster Bridge and at Trafalgar Square.

In his remarks at the event, Johnson listed issues on which he claimed Thatcher was right, including her approach to “bring about … the end of apartheid”. According to an account of his comments briefed out by No 10 on Monday evening, he said: “I hope that when we go out from this place tonight and we are waylaid by importunate nose-ringed climate change protesters we remind them that [Thatcher] was also right about greenhouse gases.

“And she took it seriously long before Greta Thunberg. And the best thing possible for the education of the denizens of the heaving hemp-smelling bivouacs that now litter Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, the best thing would be for them to stop blocking the traffic and buy a copy of Charles’s magnificent book so that they can learn about a true feminist, green and revolutionary who changed the world for the better.”

Thunberg, who has played a leading role in a global movement seeking action on the climate crisis, was born in 2003; 13 years after Thatcher left office.

Johnson, a former Daily Telegraph columnist, also paid tribute to Moore’s “almost obsessive lust for accuracy and detail that is the hallmark of all great Daily Telegraph journalists”.

Moore, referring to his time editing Johnson’s work at the paper, recently told the Evening Standard: “Well, it was a nightmare. Because of Boris always being so late – and I mean terribly late – with his copy. But, of course, he was a journalistic genius and had a great gift for seeing the nub of something and turning it into something exciting.”

Johnson joined the Telegraph after being fired from the Times having been accused of fabricating a quote from his own godfather.

Timeline Boris Johnson - three decades of sackings and giving offence Show Hide

Fired by the Times after landing a job at the newspaper through his family connections. In an article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace, Johnson allegedly invented a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas. Discussed plans to have a tabloid journalist beaten up with his fellow Old Etonian Darius Guppy. Johnson said he would try to obtain personal details of the News of the World journalist Stuart Collier. Guppy talked of hiring a contact from south London to assault Collier. In a Telegraph column he predicted that when Tony Blair arrived in Congo “the tribal warriors” would “all break out in watermelon smiles”. He added that the Queen loved the Commonwealth “partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”. It was written the year after he became an MP. Compared same-sex marriage to polygamy and bestiality in his debut book, Friends, Voters, Countrymen. “If gay marriage was OK – and I was uncertain on the issue – then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog,” said Johnson. Four years before, Johnson described gay men as “tank-topped bumboys” in his Telegraph column. Condemned for publishing an article as editor of the Spectator in which Liverpool fans were blamed for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. While the article says the event was “undeniably” a tragedy, it added: “That is no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon.” It also claimed that people in Liverpool “wallow” in their “victim status”. Fired by the then Tory leader, Michael Howard, from positions as shadow arts minister and party vice-chairman for lying about his extramarital affair with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt. When it transpired that tabloid reports, which Johnson had dismissed as an “inverted pyramid of piffle”, were true, he had refused to resign. Suggested that a rise in the number of Malaysian women attending university was down to their desire to find a husband. Suggested the “part-Kenyan” US president Barack Obama had an “ancestral dislike” of the UK. Won “most offensive Erdoğan poem” competition, two months before he was appointed foreign secretary. The limerick, for which he was handed £1,000 by the Spectator, described the Turkish president having sex with a goat. Caught on camera reciting a colonial-era poem by Rudyard Kipling in front of local dignitaries while on an official trip to Myanmar. Johnson, who was accused of “incredible insensitivity”, had been inside the sacred Buddhist site the Shwedagon Pagoda when he began murmuring the first verse of Mandalay, a later verse of which includes the line: “Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud, wot they called the Great Gawd Budd”. Criticised for making incorrect statement that the jailed British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been “teaching people journalism” rather than being on holiday in Iran. The then foreign secretary condemned her conviction for spying but his comments were later cited as proof by Iran that she was engaged in “propaganda against the regime”. Came under fire for describing Muslim women in burqas as looking like “bank robbers” and “letter boxes”. Making the comments in his Telegraph column, Johnson also called the garments “oppressive” but added that Britain should not follow other countries in banning them in public. Media firestorm ensued after a neighbour recorded a loud altercation at the home Johnson shared with his partner, Carrie Symonds. Johnson refused to answer questions about the circumstances of the tape, which featured screaming, shouting and banging. A picture of the couple posing happily subsequently appeared in the media, but Johnson repeatedly refused to say who had taken or released the photograph, or whether it was an old picture. The UK's Supreme court rules that the advice prime minister Boris Johnson gave to the Queen over proroguing parliament was "unlawful, void, and of no effect" as it rules that his decision to prorogue parliament was unlawful.

The prime minister has used the column he formerly wrote for the paper to attack Extinction Rebellion before. Insisting in April that he did not want to condemn them because of the importance of their message, he nevertheless attacked their methods and invited them to protest in Beijing, instead of London.

• This article was amended on 8 October 2019 because an earlier version referred to Moore’s book launch taking place at Royal United Services at Whitehall. In fact it took place at Whitehall’s Banqueting House.