LEADING Brexiteer Michael Gove said Barrow MP John Woodcock showed ‘courage’ in speaking out in the debate ahead of tonight's vote of no confidence in PM Theresa May.

The former Labour MP said he did not believe the party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn was fit enough to run the country. But Mr Woodcock did not side with the Conservatives, and instead abstained from the vote.

Before MPs voted 325 to 306 in support of Mrs May, Mr Gove said: “Perhaps the bravest and the finest speech that came from the opposition benches was given by the member for Barrow and Furness. It takes courage and he has it having been elected on a Labour mandate, representing working class people, to say that the leader of the party that he joined as a boy is not fit to lead the country.”

Mr Woodcock said the country was in a ‘national emergency’.

“The public deserve so much better than this choice in the broken political system they are being given,” he said. “They deserve leadership to right the terrible injustices that have been inflicted on our communities and they deserve a leadership they can trust to keep them secure.”

He added: “It is with a heavy heart that I have to tell the house that I cannot support the no confidence motion. Some of my friends mutter disgrace. Some of them tutting.

"I have to say that many of them have privately said ‘thank God that you have got the freedom to actually not support this’, because they are wrestling with their consciences of wanting desperately a Labour Government knowing that the leader of their party is as unfit to lead the country as he was when they voted against him in the no confidence motion of the party years ago.”