Michael Gove, who campaigned for Brexit during the 2016 referendum, said of the Windsor Framework vote: “The number of people who voted against was significantly fewer than had been anticipated. And some of them are people who are longstanding staunch Eurosceptics of a particular vintage.”

Mr Gove was speaking on Channel 4's ‘The Andrew Neil Show’, days after the deal to reform the Northern Ireland Protocol was backed by 515 MPs to 29, when the DUP and 22 Tories were the only members to oppose the agreement.

Asked if he was saying they were obsessives, Mr Gove replied: “No. Someone like (Sir) Bill Cash ... I would never say Bill was obsessive. Someone like Bill Cash has a longstanding, very principled position, but the overwhelming majority of the parliamentary Conservative Party supported the deal that Rishi secured which means we have stronger relations with the European Union.”

Told that 70 MPs either voted against or abstained on Wednesday's vote on the Stormont brake element of the Windsor Framework, the levelling-up secretary said: “Some of the people who didn't vote were, to use the parliamentary parlance, slipped.

“That meant they would have been supporting the government but they were elsewhere doing the government's work. We knew we were going to win.”

Mr Gove, who appeared on a number of TV programmes yesterday, also said that MPs offering advice to a fake Korean company for as much as £10,000 per day were acting “within the rules”.

But he called on MPs to “reflect” on the sting operation, saying elected officials needed to ensure they were doing “everything they can to put public service first”.

It comes after former health secretary Matt Hancock told a bogus foreign company that his daily rate for external consultancy was £10,000. Conservative former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng indicated to a fake employee of the pretend outfit that his monthly rate for such an advisory position would be no less than five figures.

Mr Kwarteng went on to suggest he could “work with” the firm's offer of paying him between £8,000 and £12,000 for each of the six annual meetings of its non-existent international advisory board.

The hoax company set up by campaign group Led By Donkeys was asking MPs to supposedly give it political advice on how to expand into the UK and European markets, with some of the sessions allegedly due to be held in South Korea.

Mr Gove defended MPs taking on work outside of Parliament as long as it was transparently noted in the register of MPs' interests, the publicly available document where politicians declare any earnings on top of their £84,144 Commons salary.

He pointed to the example of Tory women's minister Maria Caulfield, who continues to practise as a nurse, as a way of balancing MP duties with other employment. Mr Gove said: “On this occasion, I think it is pretty clear that things that were offered and considered were within the rules.”

Opponents of Rishi Sunak's Brexit deal with the EU were of ‘a particular vintage’: Michael Gove