A Liberal Democrat peer charged the taxpayer almost £9,000 for a business class flight home from America to make a parliamentary speech that lasted just four minutes.

Lord Paddick, a former Metropolitan police chief, made an intervention just 446 words long during a debate on bombing Isis targets in Iraq after flying in from New York when Parliament was recalled in 2014.

The 7,000-mile round trip saw the peer take a British Airways business class flight at an effective cost to the public purse of nearly £20 a word or £2,224 a minute.