BORIS Johnson has used “utterly despicable” tactics in order to save his own skin amid the ongoing partygate scandal, Nicola Sturgeon has said.

The First Minister launched a fierce attack on Johnson following his “parroting [of] far-right” tropes in an attempt to deflect from his own wrongdoing.

Sturgeon said that linking Labour leader Keir Starmer to Jimmy Savile, as Johnson did in Parliament on Monday, was a “Trumpian” use of fake news.

The Prime Minister’s suggestion that Starmer was responsible for failing to prosecute Savile for his crimes has been widely debunked by fact-checkers, having originated on far-right Facebook pages soon after he was elected Labour leader.

READ MORE: Keir Starmer, Jimmy Savile, and the Tories' 'move towards disinformation'

Nevertheless, Johnson repeated the false claim at the despatch box, and doubled-down on Wednesday. He told The Sun: “As far as I'm aware, it's fairly accurate.”

His false assertion has also been lent credence by a growing number of his ministerial team, including Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, Justice Secretary Dominic Raab, and Scotland Secretary Alister Jack.

Following his colleagues’ lead, Jack also implied that the far-right claim was plausible, saying: “I simply don’t know the details of when Starmer was the director of prosecutions.”

He further echoed Raab by saying that telling such falsehoods was a normal part of the “cut and thrust of politics”.

However, the First Minister contradicted the idea that the Savile accusation had been normal discourse, telling LBC: “Boris Johnson’s performance in the House of Commons two days ago was one of the most shameful, shameless, utterly despicable performances in the House of Commons I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

She said that the comments linking Keir Starmer and Jimmy Savile were “utterly despicable”, going on: “It’s appalling that the holder of the office of Prime Minister is behaving in that fake news, Trumpian manner. This is about the integrity of our democracy.

“We’ve got to ask ourselves, party politics aside, we’ve got to ask ourselves as citizens, are we content to have somebody with no integrity and no shame occupying No 10?”

Pointing to the “utterly devastating” judgments in the Sue Gray report into partygate, Sturgeon said that instead of accepting responsibility, “instead of genuinely apologising, instead of doing what in my view would be the right thing now and stepping aside, [Johnson] just tried to smear everybody around him”.

Sturgeon said that although the majority of people in the UK wanted Johnson to go, only Tory MPs had the power to make it happen. She said that the longer the backbenchers allowed Johnson to remain in office “the more they all will become tarnished and tainted and complicit in his conduct”.

Former minister Tobias Ellwood became the eleventh Tory MP to call on Johnson to step down on Wednesday. He said he would be submitting a letter of no confidence to the 1922 Committee, and urged the Prime Minister not to delay the “inevitable” vote into his leadership.

READ MORE: Tories tell devolved nations to join 'collective effort to level up the UK'

Ellwood warned that, under Johnson’s leadership, things were sliding towards “a very ugly place”.

On Tuesday, SNP MP John Nicolson issued a similar warning to tech minister Chris Philp after he also refused to condemn the Savile comment.

Nicolson said: “To double-down on the smear I think just feeds online disinformation. I really advise you to back away from this. It is beneath the dignity of a minister of the crown to defend this in any way.”

Speaking on Sky News on Tuesday, Starmer said the Savile slur was “ridiculous” and “peddled by right-wing trolls”.