Graham Stuart, MP for Beverley and Holderness, told the BBC’s Politics North show that he believes Mr Johnson is now in a stronger position than before last week’s defection by Bury South MP Christian Wakeford to Labour and David Davis’s call for the PM to quit.

Mr Stuart said there was “no sign” of the 54 letters from Tory MPs required to trigger a confidence vote. “The Parliamentary Conservative Party is united behind the Prime Minister. There’s always a faction of the disaffected that want to be noticed and the overlooked in any government.

“Boris Johnson is going to continue to government.”

He admitted there were “mixed views” in his own constituency but added: “If the media go on as much as they have relentlessly on this issue, people will get moved by it. But am I under any pressure from my association to put in a letter? Absolutely not.”

Mr Stuart said the PM had “dealt with some of the toughest challenges in our history since the Second World War”.

“You want to get rid of him over somebody thanking the staff and having a glass - however inappropriately - in a garden. I don’t think so.”

Boris Johnson retains the backing of the vast majority of Conservative MPs, a Yorkshire MP has claimed.

Blackmail claim exposes Tory bullying in desperate bid to save Boris Johnson - The Yorkshire Post says...

I don’t think so. We need we need to be mature about this. We need to recognise the seriousness of the times we live in, and we need to recognise that Boris Johnson was the person who put forward a manifesto which saw an 80-seat Conservative majority, and we need to get on with governing.”

Mr Stuart, a former whip, said he was sceptical of recent claims that Red Wall MPs had been subject to ‘blackmail’ and warnings their constituencies would lose funding if they voted against the Government on particular issues.

“If they’ve got evidence of such behaviour, then they should come forward with it. It sounds like nonsense to me.

“You lean on people in a sense, but you lean on them morally to do the right thing. You might even go as far saying, ‘It’s not going to help your career and your rep within the party’.

"But it doesn’t in my experience at all fit with the way people talk and the way government works, so I think it was again a sign that the tiny rump of rebels were getting desperate and literally throwing anything in a desperate bid to get this to get the letters in.

“I don’t think they’ve got anywhere near and Boris Johnson is more secure than when we had all this theatre from various desperate individuals.”

In relation to Partygate, Mr Stuart said the Prime Minister and people in Downing Street work “phenomenally hard” and it was incorrect to claim that they were acting “like it was some sort of frat party” at the height of the pandemic.

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Tory MPs 'united' behind Boris Johnson despite 'tiny rump of rebels', claims Graham Stuart