Yorkshire former Minister David Davis calls on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to resign

The MP for Haltemprice and Howden stood during Prime Minister’s Questions and said he expects his leaders to “shoulder the responsibility for the actions they take”, but that Boris Johnson has done “the opposite”.

Drawing on a quote from former Cabinet member Leopold Amery to his Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Mr Davis added: “You have sat there too long for all the good you have done. In the name of God, go!”

Responding to the former Brexit Secretary’s comments, Mr Johnson said: “I must say to him, I don’t know what he is talking about.

“What I can tell him – I don’t know what quotation he is alluding to – what I can tell him is and I think have told this House repeatedly, I take full responsibility for everything done in this Government and throughout the pandemic.”

The exchange came towards the end of a fiery question session for Mr Johnson, as his premiership faces pressure over partygate.

A number of Conservative MPs have gone public in their calls for the Prime Minister to step aside, while others have shared stories of their inboxes full of public anger.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer took the opportunity to label the Prime Minister's defence of him attending a gathering in Downing Street in May 2020 as "ridiculous".

Yesterday Mr Johnson claimed that nobody had informed him that such an event would be in breach of the lockdown restrictions in place at the time.

Sir Keir told the House: “The Prime Minister’s account gets more extraordinary with each version of his defence. If the Prime Minister’s new defence were true, it requires him to suggest that his staff are not being truthful when they say they warned him about the party.

“It requires the Prime Minister to expect us to believe that whilst every other person who was invited on May 20 to the party was told it was a social occasion, he alone was told it was a work meeting.

“It also requires the Prime Minister to ask us to accept that as he waded through the empty bottles and platters of sandwiches, he didn’t realise it was a party.

“Does the Prime Minister realise how ridiculous that sounds?”

Just minutes before MPs took to the Chamber for the weekly event, Red Wall Tory Christian Wakeford defected to the Labour benches, telling his former boss that “both you and the Conservative Party as a whole have shown themselves incapable of offering the leadership and government this country deserves”.

Mr Wakeford won Bury South, which had elected a Labour MP at every election since 1997, in 2019.

He announced his decision in the Bury Times and sent a letter to Mr Johnson explaining why he had lost patience with his leadership.

Mr Wakeford said: “I care passionately about the people of Bury South and I have concluded that the policies of the Conservative government that you lead are doing nothing to help the people of my constituency and indeed are only making the struggles they face on a daily basis worse.

“Britain needs a government focused on tackling the cost of living crisis and providing a path out of the pandemic that protects living standards and defends the security of all.

“It needs a government that upholds the highest standards of integrity and probity in public life and sadly both you and the Conservative Party as a whole have shown themselves incapable of offering the leadership and government this country deserves.”