Guto Harri, who served as Boris Johnson’s communications director, has claimed the former prime minister regarded Sue Gray as a “psycho” while she was carrying out her Partygate inquiry.

Speaking to LBC, he said that Mr Johnson originally respected her a lot but that, as she was carrying out her inquiry, he became “suspicious”.

“One word, maybe, that will be recurring in ‘[the podcast], ‘psycho’ Sue Gray would be part of it. There was a sense that she lacked perspective as to what he had done,” Mr Harri explained when asked how Mr Johnson described Ms Gray at the time.