Amber Rudd forced to defend Theresa May as she begs Tory MPs to get behind the Prime Minister

HOME Secretary Amber Rudd was last night forced to launch an extraordinary shoring up of embattled Theresa May.

The top Tory lavished praise on the PM for surviving her disaster hit conference speech, saying all the party should get behind her now.

Admitting that “on a personal note” the speech was “hard to watch as her throat and voice caused her such difficulties”, she begged fellow Conservative MPs to abandon their plotting.

Miss Rudd - a close ally of May but also tipped to replace  her - said the PM had “dealt with it with guts and grace.”

And she said Britain was “at a turning point” which rendered a leadership challenge dangerous.

Explaining the disaster, she added the PM “had had a heavy cold.”

“Haven’t we all been taken aback when an illness suddenly causes the voice to crack and sometimes dry up completely,” she added.

“It’s impossible to anticipate, and a crazy coincidence that it happened to our PM, at conference, live on television.”

In a gushing article penned for the Telegraph, Rudd even found time for a dig at Cabinet rival Boris Johnson, joking that she had been forced to “nudge” the Foreign Secretary to his feet to clap in order to buy time for Mrs May to stop her conference speech coughing.

She wrote: “And we are all standing alongside Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson – even if he takes a little nudge to get up - as he looks out to the world to make the most of our global possibilities and partnerships.”