Boris Johnson compared to Winston Churchill at his most impetuous and ignorant

Boris Johnson has been compared with his hero Winston Churchill – but only in terms of the wartime hero’s most devastating military failure.

Former Lib Dem chief Sir Vince Cable attacked the PM and his Brexit plans at his party’s conference in Bournemouth.

He said the Tory leader “likes to see himself as the reincarnation of Winston Churchill” but highlighted how even he made “terrible mistakes”.

Sir Vince said: “Johnson is learning not from the Churchill who prosecuted the Battle of Britain but from the Churchill of Gallipoli when his impetuousness and ignorance, underestimation of the opposition, combined to produce a costly disaster and humiliation – Brexit foreshadowed.”

Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty when Allied forces tried to take control of the Dardanelles Straits in the First World War, also known as the Gallipoli campaign.

There were hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Sir Vince, 76, quits at the next election after handing the reins to Jo Swinson.

Meanwhile, activists backed a majority Lib Dem Government scrapping Brexit with no second referendum.

And the party’s North Devon candidate, Kirsten Johnson, sparked a row by suggesting that locals had backed Brexit because the area is 98% white.

She said: “We don’t have a lot of ethnic minorities, people aren’t exposed to people from other countries, and I think there is a slight disconnect that North Devon … hasn’t appreciated the advantages of being in the EU.”