Tory Brexiteer compares European Commission president to Hitler in BBC interview

Although Boris Johnson's new government cabinet was hardly anything to cheer about, we can be thankful that it didn't include hard Brexiteer Mark Francois.

The Tory MP has become a prominent and controversial voice for Brexit and has been recorded telling pro-EU activists that 'we are signing your death warrant' and once said 'up yours' to the former chancellor, Philip Hammond, on live radio.

Quite how Francois keeps getting on TV is a little beyond us but he always provides some sort of controversial statement, which ultimately ends up making headlines for the wrong reasons.

On Thursday evening, he made an appearance on Newsnight where Kirsty Wark quizzed him about Boris Johnson's negotiating standpoint with the European Union. She said:

He's [Johnson] been talking about negotiating positions. Never take no-deal off the table because it is a negotiating position.

So, therefore why can't the European Union be exactly the same. The EU said that's absolutely nothing that will change.

Francois then interrupted Wark, not with an informed answer to her query but a statement that some have labelled as xenophobic after he referred to Jean-Claude Juncker as 'Herr Juncker in the bunker', a clear reference to Adolf Hitler.

The video was made available on the BBC Newsnight Twitter account but since been deleted, however, it hasn't prevented people from criticising Francois for using such language.

In a comment to the Indy100, a spokesperson for Mark Francois said as follows:

The initial reaction of the European Union to our new PM is to say that we must still ratify the Withdrawal Agreement, despite the House of Commons having defeated it three times already and Boris Johnson saying numerous times on the campaign trail that the Agreement is dead. This is what I meant by the bunker mentality of the EU who must realise we are now leaving the EU at Halloween whether they like it or not, because that is what 17.4m British people voted for.

More: Mark Francois said that wrecking the car industry in a no-deal Brexit would 'at least be our choice'