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The outgoing head of London's police said on Tuesday that his resignation statement was not an attack on the way Prime Minister David Cameron had handled a phone hacking crisis.

"I was taking no such swipe at the prime minister," Paul Stephenson told a parliamentary committee investigating the crisis engulfing Rupert Murdoch's News Corp media empire and the police.

Stephenson announced his resignation on Sunday after it emerged that the force had hired Neil Wallis, a former deputy newspaper editor now implicated in the scandal, as a media adviser.

In his resignation statement, Stephenson appeared to be contrasting his behaviour with that of Cameron, who employed former News of the World tabloid editor Andy Coulson as his communications chief.

On Tuesday he told the committee he agreed with Cameron that the two situations were not comparable. "Of course the employment of Mr Coulson and the employment by the Met (police) of Mr Wallis was entirely different," he said.   -  Reuters