After handing Theresa May her P45 , Lee Nelson escorted from Tory conference

A man has been escorted from the Tory Party conference after handing Theresa May her P45.

Comedian and notorious prankster Lee Nelson interrupted the PM’s keynote speech at the conference in Manchester to say: ‘Prime Minister, Prime Minister… Boris Johnson asked me to give you this.’

After recovering from the unexpected interruption, May said: ‘I was about to talk about someone I’d like to give a P45 to and that’s Jeremy Corbyn.’

There were chants of ‘out, out, out’ from Tory MPs and activists as Nelson, real name Simon Brodkin, was escorted out of the building.

As the protester was bundled out of the hall, May briefly stopped speaking before the party faithful stood to applaud and cheer her.

He quipped that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson – who is widely believed to have ambitions to be prime minister himself – had told him to hand the P45 to May.

‘Boris told me to hand her a P45. He didn’t tell me why. He wanted me to do it.’

An image of the offending P45, tweeted out by ITV’s Robert Peston, listed May’s gender as ‘robot’.

Despite encouragement from her party, May was visibly shaken after the prank and struggled to regain her composure. The PM struggled to deliver the remainder of her keynote speech repeatedly coughing and losing her voice. 

She had to stop on several occasions to drink water and take a cough sweet which she said came from Chancellor Philip Hammond. ‘Shows what good the chancellor’s cough sweet is,’ she said, as she continued to attempt to give her speech. 

And it looks as though she wasn’t the only one that was close to giving up – as letters from the slogan on the wall behind her started to fall off.