FAWLTY Towers star John Cleese has described the row over Philip Schofield as “astonishingly trivial”.

Asked about the Philip Schofield row engulfing ITV, he told GB News: “It seems to me to be astonishingly trivial. Aren’t there quite important things going on in the world at the moment?

“And to concentrate on this, I always wonder, why is it that the right wing press don’t want to have to talk about how awful the government is, and so they’re looking for any other story?”

In an interview with Camilla Tominey, he also slammed the record of the Government.

He said: “I thought that Liz Truss’s ideas for the economy were a complete disaster. They appealed to the extreme right wing of the Conservative Party, which is how she got into power, but now I think we need a centrist government and one that is much more competent and not so corrupt, because the one thing that bothers me about this Government more than anything else is the degree of corruption.

“You name it, I think it’s all very corrupt, paying off their cronies and promoting them to the House of Lords, people who are merely Tory donors. I mean, there should be some merit attached to being in the House of Lords, you know, that you’ve done something important in government or in trade unions.”

John also revealed that he turned down an offer of a peerage: “I was asked if I wanted to be a peer, that was Paddy Ashdown, who I adored and ran the Lib Dems for some time and I was very close with Paddy.

“And at the end, he wanted to ask me if I wanted to be in the Lords to vote and that means representing them and that meant being in England in the winter and I’m afraid that’s not on.”

Asked about his view on Prince Harry and Meghan, he said: “I do have sympathy for them, yes.
“If I had to choose who to have dinner with, either the Royal Family or ex -Royal Family, I would choose them.”

John is currently recording a series of programmes for GB News and the first one is to be aired in September.