This is not the time to change the leader, Armed Forces Minister James Heappey has argued, as he defended the prime minister.

Budget U-turns
On Monday, Mr Hunt announced that almost all the tax cuts announced at last month’s mini-budget would be scrapped.
And he said the government’s energy support package – a policy repeatedly championed by Mrs. Truss in defense of her premiership – will be reduced from April.
Former Cabinet Minister Andrew Mitchell said Conservative MPs should recognize “the best possible answer for good government” is to ensure leadership under Ms Truss and Mr Hunt works.
“They are now working together in tandem and I think that arrangement has got the chance to work” he said.
“If it’s not a success and it doesn’t work, then the conservative parliamentary party will have to think again.”
Some Tory MPs are talking privately about how Ms Truss could be expelled from office, despite party rules preventing a formal leadership challenge for a year.
At a meeting of the centrist One Nation Tories, many MPs called for a cabinet reshuffle.
Following the meeting, MP Simon Hoare said: “If there was a seriousness about a reset and a recalibration then there would have to be a reshuffle.”
One MP described Ms Truss’s meeting as “the first time I’ve heard a corpse deliver its own eulogy”.

An unknown number of MPs have sent letters to the 1922 Committee, which represents the backbenchers and which controls the rules surrounding Tory leadership contests.
Some hope that if more than half of MPs told committee chair Sir Graham Brady that they want the prime minister to go, he would make it clear to her.
One person who backed Ms Truss for leadership agreed that she was unlikely to lead the party into the next election, but said: “You’re often defined by what your opponents can’t do”, meaning that if the plotters can’t agree, The PM will remain in place.
There appears to be little agreement about who should take over from Ms Truss if she was removed.
Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has quashed rumors that he could replace Ms Truss if she resigns.
Speaking to the Times, he said that he will be holding on to his current job and accused Tory MPs of playing “political parlor games”.