Former premier Najib Abdul Razak says Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin should have told him that he wasn't on the right track.

"Khairy is free to come and see me and say: ‘Look sir. I think you are not on the right track, or there is some problem, you know, which were not resolved in a proper way.’ Then I could then decide, whether to accept or not to accept.

“He didn’t do that. I mean, he admitted that he didn’t do that,” Najib said in an interview with Malay Mail.

Khairy had in an interview with Channel News Asia said that no-one in Umno wanted to acknowledge that there was a problem in Umno and that was a terrible mistake.

Najib, however, said that he practised an open style where people were free to voice their comments.

"Except that I want it to be done in private, because we should not attack each other as members of the government.

“He (Khairy) should realise that I’m not going to dictate against anyone with difference of opinion. I only want party discipline, and those who were disciplined by the party, it was because they broke party discipline,” he said.

Umno and BN suffered its first ever general election defeat on May 9.

The loss led to Najib's resignation as Umno president and BN chairperson on May 12.

Khairy, who is also Rembau MP, acknowledged that the loss was a collective responsibility and said that both BN and Umno have to accept that they had been "systematically rejected" by the people.