BORIS Johnson appears ill-prepared for the hard work of government despite winning an 80-seat Commons majority, the former Tory Chancellor Ken Clarke has said.

Mr Clarke, who quit the Commons after being stripped of the Tory whip by Mr Johnson, said the Prime Minister had plenty of rhetoric but lacked a coherent set of policies.

He told BBC Radio 5 Live: “Governing the country is more than going around saying, ‘Oooh, 2020 is going to be a golden year, and we’re going to be global Britain.

“At the moment we’ve got a stagnant, fragile economy, an angry, discontented population.

“It’s a very dangerous world out there in many, many ways.”

He said Mr Johnson’s lack of a policy on social care was telling.

In his first speech as Prime Minister in July, Mr Johnson said outside Number 10: “I am announcing now – on the steps of Downing Street – that we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared.”

However there was no plan in the Tory manifesto beyond an extra £1bn a year and a desire to “build a cross-party consensus to bring forward an answer that solves the problem”.

Mr Johnson later admitted his clear plan still ”needs to be developed”.

Mr Clarke said: “We don’t have any policy on social care, which is the biggest single domestic problem facing us.”

The Sunday Times reported Donald Trump had invited Mr Johnson and partner Carrie Symonds to the White House in the New Year to discuss a “massive trade deal” between the UK and US after Brexit.

But Mr Clarke said Number 10 still appeared to be too stuck in campaign mode to govern well, and that Mr Johnson’s chief aide, Dominic Cummings, held too much sway.

He said: “I don’t get the impression that they’ve yet pressed the government button. They’ve now got five years, and certainly for the first two or three they can do whatever they want. Do they know what they want? Are they prepared for that?”

He said the PM had “better get on with it and shunt aside all these people who won the campaign for him, quite brilliantly, and get in some policy wonks, strengthen his cabinet, have some ministers who can take through some things that will make a real difference. I don’t get the impression that politicians are in charge, together with someone who knows something about governing.”

He said Mr Johnson was generally vague on policy but especially on Brexit.

“I could never get out of Boris – and nobody so far could get out of Boris – what he has in mind for the eventual deal. To say they’re generalities is an understatement.

“It’s not good sitting alongside the people who’ve been mandated by 27 other governments and just saying your aim is to be global Britain. They’ll say, ‘What are we going to do about nuclear safeguarding in Euratom?’”

Mr Clarke, a Health Sercretary to Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s and Chancellor to John Major in the 1990s, left parliament at the election after 49 years as an MP.