The former Tory chairman Lord Tebbit went out on a political limb today by calling on voters to boycott the Conservatives in the European elections to show their fury about MPs' abuse of parliamentary expenses.

Lord Tebbit said that he wanted a message sent to the leaders of both the main political parties that their MPs had got out of hand.

He said that he expected both David Cameron and Gordon Brown to discipline members of their parties who are shown to have made dubious expenses claims.

“What I am advising people is to show our major parties that it is the electors who are masters, and the electors are extremely upset with their employees in the House of Commons," he told the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“Of course not everybody is going to obey my suggestion, or accept my suggestion, so what we would get is much the same result but on an extremely low poll.

“The leaders of the major parties would be reminded that the electors can quite easily show their displeasure."

Lord Tebbit's characteristically outspoken and off-message remark poses a ticklish disciplinary issue for Mr Cameron to deal with as Tory leader.

The peer insisted that he was not advocating support for any other party, but there was immediate speculation that the peer – a fierce Eurosceptic – hopes to encourage voters to switch to the UK Independence Party (Ukip).

Any open call to back Ukip would almost inevitably force Mr Cameron to expel Baroness Thatcher’s former right-hand man from the party.

Lord Tebbit stressed that his call applied only to the European elections on June 4, and not to the local government polls taking place on the same day, nor to the general election expected next year.

“In a general election, I am quite sure that I would be advising people to vote Conservative in the same way that I am advising people in the local government elections to vote in the way they normally do," he went on.

“Whether they choose to vote for one of the other parties or not is a matter for them. I wouldn’t advise anyone to vote for a party other than the Conservative Party. I am not doing that and I have never done that.”

The BBC said Lord Tebbit made clear before his interview that he would advise people against backing the far-right British National Party in protest against the mainstream parties.

Lord Tebbit said the controversy over expenses did not discredit the House of Commons as an institution, but the current generation of MPs.

“There is nothing wrong with the House of Commons,” he said.

“The institution is sound, it is in good order. What is wrong is that the people who are currently in it are misbehaving. They need a pretty powerful shot across their bows.”

Labour peer Lord Foulkes described Lord Tebbit’s boycott call as “dangerous nonsense”, telling Today: “The BNP is a racist party and Ukip have had their own expenses problems in the European Parliament.

“When we get to that stage, we really are in danger of undermining the whole system of democracy.”

It is not the first time that Lord Tebbit's outspoken remarks have embarrassed Mr Cameron.

In September 2007, when Mr Brown was riding high in the polls and the Tories were struggling, Lord Tebbit declared that Eton-educated Mr Cameron was regarded as out of touch by ordinary people, and that it was only natural that Mr Brown should make himself the “heir to Thatcher”.

Many people believed that the Conservative leader and his colleagues did not know how the other half lived, Lord Tebbit said.

The former MP for Chingford, a jealous guardian of the Thatcher flame, has coined a number of pungent remarks that have entered the political lexicon.

In 1981 he dismissed jobless rioters by saying that his own father had "got on his bike and looked for work" when unemployed in the 1930s, and in 1990 he suggested a "cricket test" for ethnic minorities in Britain, asking them which national cricket side they supported as a test of their Britishness.

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