The Armed Forces minister suggested Prime Minister Boris Johnson may have been let down by his staff as he warned Conservative colleagues to keep 'cool heads'.
The PM is engaged in a battle for political survival and he faces the prospect of another bruising Prime Minister's Questions at noon today (Wednesday, January 19) as well as a possible leadership challenge.
Minister James Heappey, MP for Wells in Somerset, told Times Radio: “If you are going through a day in which you are having calls with world leaders, meetings on national security, meetings on 10 different policy areas, all of those meetings come and go in the blink of an eye, you rely utterly on the team around you to make sure that you are properly briefed and to have your back around what it is that they put in your diary.
“As unedifying as I think it is to point to those who perhaps don’t have a platform with which to respond, the reality is that those who work around the Prime Minister need to have his back.”
He also warned his colleagues to keep “cool heads” as he said now was not the time to change Prime Minister.
The Armed Forces minister told BBC Breakfast: “What’s going on in the world right now, whether it be from a security perspective where there’s incredible instability in a number of regions of the world where the UK has great interest, or economically where as we’ve discussed inflation is rising as the global economy recovers from the pandemic.
“Or from the pandemic itself, which whilst I think the UK has weathered the Omicron surge well, by the way, that’s in no small measure of thanks for the decisions the Prime Minister has taken, we’re not out of the woods yet, and there’s still work to be done.
“This doesn’t feel like the time to be changing Prime Minister to me.”
