Dr Sarah Wollaston appeared on BBC Radio Devon on Thursday morning to talk about why she was one of 11 Tory MPs to rebel against her own Government over an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill.

Explaining what the vote was about, Dr Wollaston said: “There was a clause in the Bill, clause 9, around the implementing of the Withdrawal Agreement that gave a minister the power, with no Act of Parliament, to take us out of the EU.” She called the withdrawal from the EU the most “constitutionally significant” move that Parliament has ever taken, and without the amendment, this could have happened “with almost no scrutiny whatsoever”.

“If we’re genuinely going to bring back control to Parliament, what we were promised was a meaningful vote, and even people like Jacob Rees-Mogg were saying in Parliament yesterday that they thought clause 9 should be removed.

“One of my colleagues put forward a very sensible amendment that would give us a meaningful vote, as we were promised, and it has been very badly misrepresented.”

The misrepresentation that Dr Wollaston was talking about includes the Daily Mail front page that showed pictures of the eleven Conservative MPs who voted for the amendment with the headline “Proud of yourselves?”.

It called the eleven MPs “self-consumed malcontents” who “pull the rug from under our EU negotiators, betray their leader, party and 17.4m Brexit voters”.

Dr Wollaston said that she felt it was “very important” that people knew that “this wasn’t a vote to stop Brexit, just to put in place the thing we all voted for, which was to bring control back to Parliament”.

She added that people didn’t vote to “bring control back to a Government minister to make a decision without Parliament looking at it”.

She said that this wasn’t a party political issue and it meant that “MPs across parties, were not looking at this through the lens of party politics, but through a lens of their own constituencies, to say ‘is this the right deal?’ and to have a meaningful vote on it.”

Talking on the fact that the vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, Steve Hammond MP, was sacked after backing the amendment put forward by Tory MP Dominic Grieve, Dr Wollaston said that it was a “shame” because she considered him a “decent and thoroughly honourable person” but that it was “the way it is” that if you have a position in a party, and you then vote against that party, that position will be removed and “he will have known that when he voted”.

She added that this vote was “not about disloyalty” but about “MPs doing their jobs” and said that the Government could have “accepted the amendment or removed clause 9”.

She said that she hoped people “look behind the headline such as the one from the Daily Mail” and that people should be “more respectful of other people’s views”.