The actor Hugh Grant has hit back at an attack on his character by Sajid Javid, the chancellor of the exchequer. In an interview in this week’s ES magazine, Javid said the pair had met at the London premiere of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman.

He told ES Magazine: “I recognised him and put my hand out and said, ‘Lovely to meet you’, and you know what he does? He refuses to shake my hand.

“He says, ‘I am not shaking your hand.’ I am completely shocked. He said, ‘When you were culture secretary, you didn’t support my friends in [anti-media intrusion campaign] Hacked Off.’

“I think that is incredibly rude. I wonder if people like Hugh Grant think they are part of the elite and they look down on working class people no matter what station they reach in life.”

But a spokesperson for Grant sought to clarify the encounter to the Press Association, saying that when offered a handshake, “Grant’s words were: ‘If you don’t mind, I won’t shake your hand because you were rude and dismissive to the victims of press abuse when you met them as culture secretary.’

“Hugh would like to point out that the victims in question were not celebrities. They were people with personal family tragedies who had been abused by sections of the press.”

The spokesperson said Grant was referring to an encounter between the then culture secretary and “the victims of press abuse [who] reported back that his attitude in the meeting was ‘borderline contemptuous’.”

Writing on Twitter, Grant attacked the Daily Mail and Telegraph newspapers for failing to include his version of events in their news stories covering Javid’s accusation.

Grant has been a vociferous campaigner against press intrusion for nearly 10 years, after his suspicions were raised that widespread phone hacking by British tabloids was conducted with the consent of the Tory government.

Grant’s activism stepped up following the revelation that the voicemail of murdered teenager Milly Dowler had been hacked by the News of the World.

Last year, Grant donated a payout from Mirror Group Newspapers to the Hacked Off campaign; the newspaper apologised to Grant and others for their “morally wrong” actions in hacking their phones.

In 2014, George Clooney optioned Nick Davies’ book about the episode with a view to turning it into a film, Hack Attack. Asked his views about the project by the Guardian at the time, Grant said: “I do feel strangely proprietorial about the whole hacking, Leveson thing because it’s been a big deal in my life. So I feel weird it could be made into entertainment.”

Grant won considerable acclaim for his portrayal of disgraced Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe in the Stephen Frears miniseries A Very British Scandal, which aired earlier this year. He will next be seen in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman, as a seedy and unscrupulous tabloid reporter.