The deputy mayor of London, Kit Malthouse, complained to ex-Met commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson that too many resources were being used on the phone-hacking investigation.

Stephenson said that while the ‘reality was that this was wrong’it was nonetheless a ‘fairly widely held view’on Operation Weeting, the hacking investigation launched in January 2011.

In written evidence he stated: ‘On several occasions after Operation Weeting had started and I had returned from sick leave, the chair of the MPA [Metropolitan Police Authority], Kit Malthouse, expressed a view that we should not be devoting this level of resources to the phone-hacking inquiry as a consequence of a largely political and media-driven ‘level of hysteria’.”