A pro-Brexit junior minister has urged fellow Tories to give Prime Minister Rishi Sunak "time and space" to renegotiate the contentious Northern Ireland Protocol with the EU.
"We have to give the prime minister that time and space to get these negotiations done. We need to give him the time and space to thrash out the final elements of any final deal," Mental and Women's Health Minister Maria Caulfield said.
Caulfield spoke out after Home Secretary Suella Braverman warned Sunak against halting legislation launched under previous PM Boris Johnson to make emergency changes to the annexe to the EU withdrawal agreement.
The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill would make use of the Article 16 clause written into the protocol to suspend customs checks on commerce between the British mainland and Northern Ireland on the grounds that they have interfered with trade and are causing social unrest.
The protocol keeps the exclave inside the EU's single market on the grounds that road border checks between the north and the Republic of Ireland would breach clauses of the 1999 Good Friday Agreement guaranteeing free movement across the whole of Ireland.
Braverman said the bill "is one of the biggest tools we have in solving the problem on the Irish Sea."
But Caulfield, who quit the cabinet of then-PM Theresa along with Johnson over her 2018 'Chequers Plan' for a soft Brexit deal with the EU, agreed with MPs who said the bill should be kept in play in case Brussels reverts to its previous stance of refusing to renegotiate the protocol.
"Absolutely the Northern Ireland protocol bill was put in place as a mechanism to fall back on and that’s still going through parliament at the moment," the minister said.
Sunak met rebellious MPs on Monday in a bid to reassure them any deal struck would not sell out British or loyalist interests.
Former Brexit opportunities minister Jacob Rees-Mogg also warned Sunak against making a deal that did not command the support of Northern Irish unionists or the European Research Group (ERG) of Eurosceptic MPs.
"I don’t know why so much political capital has been spent on something without getting the DUP and the ERG onside first," Rees-Mogg said. "It’s important to get support for it first before you finalise the details and that doesn’t seem to have been done here."
The former minister compared the situation to the governing style of May who was forced to resign after conceding too much to Brussels in talks on the withdrawal agreement. He said that under May, Downing Street would initially deny media reports of government policy changes only to confirm them later.