TORY leadership frontrunner Boris Johnson once said it would be "utterly outrageous" to have a Scottish Prime Minister.

The comment was part of an article by Johnson published in The Spectator in 2005, highlighted by The Scotsman as the Tory MP moves nearer to replacing Theresa May in No 10.

The piece was written in response to the possibility of Gordon Brown succeeding Tony Blair as prime minister.

Johnson wrote: "[It] would be utterly outrageous, not just because he is a gloomadon-popping, interfering, high-taxing complicator of life, but mainly because he is a Scot, and government by a Scot is just not conceivable in the current constitutional context.

"Not only is Scotland full of rotten boroughs, where Labour MPs are returned by relatively tiny electorates but, as I never tire of saying, we English MPs can be overruled by Scottish MPs on very controversial questions, affecting our constituents, when we have no corresponding say over those questions in Scotland, and those Scottish MPs themselves have no say over those questions, so that John Reid, Scottish Health Secretary for the so-called UK, has no say over health questions in so far as they affect his own constituents.

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"Some say this is just inside-beltway stuff. They are wrong. It makes English audiences roar with anger, and it explains why Gordon Brown makes so many speeches about ‘Britishness’ and ‘British values’. He’s not really interested in British values. He’s worried about his personal political disability as a Scottish MP, and so he should be."

Responding to an article about Johnson's comments, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon today tweeted: "I think he’ll probably find we think the same about him."

It comes after a similar revelation that as editor of The Spectator in 2004, Boris Johnson authorised a "satirical" poem labelling Scots "tartan dwarves" who needed to be "comprehensively exterminated".

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Friendly Fire, by James Michie, also included a line saying it was "time Hadrian’s Wall was refortified, to pen them in a ghetto on the other side".