TEESSIDE MP Simon Clarke has brushed off a call for Boris Johnson to resign as Prime Minister.

Mr Clarke, MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, said Mr Johnson was focused on leading the country out of the Covid pandemic.

“The Prime Minister was very clear we will get on with the job of getting the country through the pandemic,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One.

He added the Government is focused on delivering "economic recovery, levelling up opportunity across the country, making a success of Brexit and honouring the manifesto in which we were elected under Boris Johnson with a huge majority two years ago."

"That is the right thing to do," Mr Clarke continued, "and I think that is what my constituents would want to see happen as much as anyone else. "

Read more: Boris Johnson Plan B announcement: Full list of Covid rules to change tomorrow

Conservative former minister David Davis called for the Prime Minister to resign on Wednesday at prime minister's questions. 

Mr Davis told Boris Johnson he had spent weeks defending him from “angry constituents”, including by reminding them of the “successes of Brexit”.

He said: “I expect my leaders to shoulder the responsibility for the actions they take. Yesterday he did the opposite of that. So, I will remind him of a quotation which may be familiar to his ear: Leopold Amery to Neville Chamberlain.

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go.”

It came shortly after Bury South MP Christian Wakeford defected from the Conservatives to Labour, telling Boris Johnson that “you and the Conservative Party as a whole have shown themselves incapable of offering the leadership and government this country deserves”.

But the Treasury Chief Secretary Mr Clarke disagreed with former cabinet member Mr Davis. He said: “I disagree very strongly with David Davis, I disagree very strongly with Christian Wakeford.

“The priority now is to make sure that this country which has, like much of the world, gone through such difficult times in the last two years is now in a position to come out of the pandemic really strongly. We have the strongest economic growth in the world.

“I am fully supportive of the Prime Minister.”

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