Boris Johnson addresses supporters during a rally for the 'Vote Leave' campaign on April 15, 2016 (Christopher Furlong/Getty)

Boris Johnson defended those who oppose gay people in the military, claiming that “they are, of course, right” in a newly emerged article he wrote for The Spectator while in his thirties.

In the same article the current leader of the Conservative party also defended foxhunting and the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who tortured tens of thousands of people between 1973 and 1990.

In another column he suggested that there was “a grit of truth” in the homophobic Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe’s claim the Labour Party was composed of “gay gangsters.”

And he complained that police officers were too busy “stuck on racial awareness programmes” or trying to “catch paedophiles in ancient public schools” to investigate the theft of his bike.

The shocking comments were uncovered by The Mirror in Have I Got Views For You, a collection of Johnson’s writing published in 2008.

His 1999 Spectator article reads: “Across the country, there are many Tories who wish their party leadership would speak up more strongly against, say, gays in the military, or the cowing of the police by the Macpherson report, or the arrest of General Pinochet, or the impending abolition of the oath and the cap badge of the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary], or the abolition of the hereditary peers and foxhunting.

“They are, of course, right.”

Responding to the comments, Labour condemned Johnson as “a danger to the country.”

He thinks he is born to rule and stands against everything that holds our communities together.

“The more we learn, the worse it gets,” Shadow chancellor John McDonnell said. “As well as being a danger to our NHS and a pathological liar, it is clear that Boris Johnson is a deeply unpleasant individual.

“He is a danger to women, to single mothers, the working class, minorities, gay people, and to anyone who doesn’t look like him. He thinks he is born to rule and stands against everything that holds our communities together.

“Boris Johnson is a danger to our country. He must be stopped.”

Throughout his election campaign Johnson has repeatedly rejected calls to apologise for his numerous offensive comments, even while acknowledging that his words may “seem offensive.”

“If you go through all my articles with a fine-tooth comb and take out individual phrases, there is no doubt that you can find things that can be made to seem offensive, and of course I understand that,” he said on BBC’s Question Time in November.

Johnson’s casual anti-gay rhetoric includes calling gay men “tank-topped bum boys” and comparing same-sex marriage to a union between “three men and a dog”. He also attacked “Labour’s appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools.”

A 2004 novel he authored, Seventy-Two Virgins, contains numerous misogynistic, homophobic and racist references, including descriptions of Arabs as having “hook noses” and “slanty eyes”. The word “negroid” is also used.

And last week he was strongly criticised for once writing that single mothers were to blame for “producing a generation of ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children.”