The Prime Minister’s comments about the BBC and the Church of England came as he tried to rally Tory backbenchers at a private meeting ahead of a vote tomorrow on whether the Prime Minister should be referred to the privileges committee for misleading the Commons.

Boris Johnson should apologise for ‘slandering’ Archbishop 

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, told the Telegraph that Mr Johnson’s “attacks” on Britain’s institutions were unpatriotic and that he should apologise for “slandering” the Archbishop.

Despite the BBC’s suggestion that he would not be willing to put his life on the line for the truth, Mr Johnson has previously spoken about work he did as a correspondent in Kosovo and Belgrade during the 1999 NATO campaign.

However, those who claimed to have known Johnson during this period claimed that he was unwilling to get involved in the action on the frontline.

In 2016 Vesna Peric Zimonic, a journalist from Belgrade, who says he worked as a fixer for the now-Prime Minister, told the the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network that Mr Johnson had refused to go to Serbian city of Novi Pazar when it was being bombed.

“He preferred staying in Belgrade in a hotel, press club, and cafe. Once, we had a fixed transport and escort by the Army to Novi Pazar when some bombing happened there. He refused to go and stayed in Belgrade,” Mr Peric Zimonic said.

“All the time he kept saying that he had a booked holiday and that he needed to return to the UK as soon as possible, or his wife would have a grudge about it.”

A BBC spokesperson said: “A key part of being a BBC journalist is to ask questions of people they are interviewing, which is what Justin was doing here.

“We do not ‘take positions’ on political matters and when a presenter asks a question, that does not mean they are expressing their own views.”