Boris Johnson urged fox hunters to break the law and keep killing animals despite the practice being banned, in an article written while he was a Conservative MP.

In the 2005 piece, Mr Johnson said he “loved” hunting with dogs, in part because of the “semi-sexual relation with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit.

The future prime minister argued that the imposition of the ban was “not about cruelty” but “a Marxian attack” by the Labour government on the upper class.

“It is a brutal and pointless liquidation of a way of life. They ban it just because they can; and the people I really despair of are those idiots who say that they ‘don’t care much one way or another’,”…