Adam Boulton, the editor-at-large of Sky News, ripped into the current generation of politicians last week in an address to the Pembroke Politics Society.

While he had planned to give an overview of his career, his talk last Wednesday focused on the “existential crisis” in politics and became a damning indictment of current politicians, slamming Theresa May, David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn.

“This lot are really useless”, said Boulton, who has been a towering figure in journalism for over two decades.

He claimed that, in the run-up to the EU referendum, neither side was prepared to make an honest argument about what they stood for. Most egregiously at fault was David Cameron, he insisted, who “crashed the country”.

Boulton said that while he predicted near the start of his career that the issue of Europe would tear apart the Conservative Party, he did not know it would tear the country apart. He pointed to a small group of Conservatives which was able to reinvigorate an issue which he suggested MPs should probably decide for us.

He pointed out that EU membership was not a major concern of voters, saying that pollsters stopped asking the public about it in the 1990s because the UK’s membership was unquestioned, like our membership of NATO or the UN.

On the current Brexit deliberations, Boulton hit out at Theresa May’s government, saying it has “charged into negotiations with no clear idea of what it wants” and is led by a prime minister “who bows in the direction” of whatever the right-wing of her party wishes.

In 17 years of interviewing Theresa May, Boulton said she was friendly and polite but never said anything interesting, and was narrower and less imaginative than anyone feared.

Boulton also ripped into Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, saying: “In my career, I’ve spent more time turning down interviews with Jeremy Corbyn than accepting them.”

For many years, Boulton said, Corbyn was the kind of undesirable interviewee the Labour Party would put forward late in the afternoon, sparking nothing but groans in the Sky News room.

He also pointed to a similar crisis of credibility in the media. But aside from the loss in advertising revenue caused by the internet, Boulton put the bulk of the blame squarely back on politicians. He said that media handlers and PR spinners are increasingly excluding journalists from the discussion which means MPs are not getting the scrutiny the public deserves.

Boulton pointed to a “grim choice between two incompetent political parties” and said he was concerned for the generation sitting before him.

“At least it’s an interesting future,” he said. A few people laughed.