Bury South MP Christian Wakeford has this morning defected from the Conservatives to Labour.

Mr Wakeford told Boris Johnson that “you and the Conservative Party as a whole have shown themselves incapable of offering the leadership and government this country deserves”.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer welcomed Mr Wakeford’s defection saying: “The policies of the Conservative government are doing nothing to help the people of Bury South and indeed are only making the struggles they face on a daily basis worse.”

The former Conservative MP announced his defection moments before Mr Johnson faced MPs at Prime Minister’s Questions and a day after the PM said “nobody told me” attending a Downing Street garden party during the May 2020 lockdown was breaking COVID rules.

Pressure on Mr Johnson’s leadership started ramping up this morning after around 12 more letters of no confidence were submitted to Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, Sky News political correspondents were told.

They were from MPs who were part of a group of around 20 first voted in at the 2019 general election, many in traditionally “red wall” Labour seats in the North.

The mutiny by the 2019 intake of Conservative MPs, following a meeting of about 20 last night, has been branded the “pork pie plot” as one of the MPs is Alicia Kearns, the MP for Rutland and Melton, home of the Melton Mowbray pork pie.

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