Rebekah Brooks asked Times editor James Harding to reveal his sources on the Milly Dowler phone-hacking story, a court has heard.

Brooks emailed the Harding on 5 July 2011 to ask how reporter Sean O’Neill knew that the News of the World had intercepted Dowler’s voice messages.

This followed an exclusive story in the Guardian that wrongly claimed that News of the World journalists had deleted messages from Dowler’s account.