Tom Tugendhat gave the stark assessment of the situation after Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle issued MPs with advice from the government’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to minimise their security risks.

“If hackers have switched on the microphone on one phone, everyone in the room might be overheard,” Hoyle wrote to MPs.

The NCSC advice includes suggestions that MPs should set up multi-factor verification in their phones, as well as update software and delete old messages. The organisation also advised senior politicians not to take their phones into sensitive meetings, as only one person’s phone camera or microphone needed to be compromised for everyone in a room to be put at risk.

The assessment follows reports of Liz Truss’s personal phone being hacked during the Tory leadership election campaign by agents suspected of working for the Kremlin. 

According to the Mail on Sunday, the hack allowed foreign agents to gain access to sensitive information...