Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, has said that the U.K. finance minister has got a bad case of "foot in mouth disease" and is doing himself no favors by mocking him in parliament.
On Wednesday, the U.K.'s Chancellor George Osborne ridiculed a report saying that Varoufakis was advising the opposition Labour party, telling the House of Commons that "Varoufakis was recruited because Chairman Mao was dead and Mickey Mouse was busy."
Responding to the slur, Yanis Varoufakis told CNBC that he was intrigued that George Osborne had "this foot in mouth disease."
"So when George Osborne comes out and pokes fun at me, obviously trying to luxuriate in the fact that I'm a defeated finance minister, yes, I am a defeated finance minister but in the hands of whom? Of an iron-clad European Union that decided to asphyxiate us using bank closures in order to impose upon us another extend and pretend bailout. The British people know that."
"Does George Osborne really seriously believe that by mocking me he is doing himself any favors in his intellectual class?...I don't think he is doing himself any intellectual favors."
"He seems unable to prevent own goals being scored all the time," he added.
Varoufakis said he was supporting the campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union (EU) but that he had been impressed with the "leave" arguments put forward by conservative politicians Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. They had, he said, "sounder intellectual ideas" than Osborne.
Earlier in the week it emerged that the Greek Marxist economist was going to advise the U.K.'s Labour party "in some capacity," according to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Varoufakis told CNBC that there was no formal contract and that he was "talking to everybody" including Caroline Lucas from the Green party and former Conservative Chancellor Normal Lamont.
Talking to each other, he said, would help find common ground and a "common program to stop this slide into the abyss" in Europe. Asked whether he was receiving any money from the Labour party, he said: "Of course not. I have no such contract with anyone, let alone Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party."
Varoufakis became a very public figure when Greece's financial crisis reached a peak in 2015 and the country came very close to abandoning both its bailout program and the euro zone.
Close to Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Varoufakis led the Syriza party's charge against austerity but his straight-talking and uncompromising beliefs caused tension with other euro zone finance ministers.