John Mortimer, the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, has accused New Labour of undermining the nation's three great guiding tenets - habeas corpus, Shakespeare and "the great British breakfast".
We now live "in the age of David Blunkett and muesli," the former barrister told the Edinburgh Book Festival, with the country run by a cabal of "middle-rate barristers who can do that trick of looking rather appealing and lost and young and needy, but not much more".
The novelist and playwright, formerly one of the leading celebrity campaigners for a Labour government, said the remit of the Hutton inquiry appeared to be too narrow. "The right question is who misled us about the 45 minutes. What he seems to be trying to answer was who was responsible for Dr [David] Kelly killing himself. I hope he will finally answer the question about whether we were deceived, which I think has a fairly obvious answer.
"What is extraordinary is this smokescreen of an attack on the BBC which Alastair Campbell thought up quite effectively, which is clouding the whole issue. It is not the fault of the BBC, it's what the government is up to. But Hutton is a good man."
Sir John also attacked the government for dismantling the age-old safeguards built into the criminal justice system. "You can be imprisoned without trial in England now - habeas corpus isn't there - and they are trying to cut down on juries. They say juries can't understand cases because they are too stupid. They conceal the fact that there are no policemen to answer 999 calls by imposing huge mandatory sentences for every conceivable offence. I think it is all very sad."
Once Mortimer said he had argued that the great thing about Britain was the trinity of Shakespeare, trial by jury with the presumption of innocence, and the cooked breakfast.
"Well, the British breakfast has pretty well disappeared, so has habeas corpus, and they are not teaching Shakespeare in schools properly anymore...
"Those of us who wanted a Labour government more than anything are suffering a period of deep disappointment. After they won the election they were stuck with a lot of conservative policies."
Nor was Mortimer much impressed with the Prime Minister as an orator. "Tony Blair is good at making that speech about 'I'm a nice guy and it's not my fault and please don't hate me', but that's about it."
The 80-year-old said his character Rumpole would live on to point up the erosion of civil rights. Even though Timothy West now plays him in a radio version of the series, he still thinks that the late actor Leo McKern embodied his spirit. "Leo's great party trick was to pop out his glass eye in restaurants and drop it into his spaghetti bolognese. I remember one waiter fainting in horror."
