Acid attacker Arthur Collins has been jailed for another eight months for using a smuggled mobile phone to call his reality TV star ex-girlfriend Ferne McCann from his prison cell.

Collins, 25, is serving a 20-year sentence for hurling the corrosive liquid across a crowded dancefloor in an east London nightclub.

Last month he admitted hiding a phone, two Sim cards and two memory sticks inside a crutch while awaiting trial over the attack, which left 16 people with chemical burns and three people temporarily blinded.

Collins, from Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, claimed he had used the device to make private calls to then pregnant Ms McCann, who gave birth to their baby daughter, Sunday, in November.

Appearing at Woolwich Crown Court by video link from high security Belmarsh prison sporting a full beard, he showed no emotion at Woolwich Crown Court on Wednesday as he was sentenced for a single charge of possessing a prohibited item while in prison.

Judge Nicholas Heathcote Williams said: “The presence of a mobile phone or component part such as a Sim card has many implications, not only for the prison establishment, but also the wider environment.

“It provides a prisoner or prisoners with an opportunity to communicate they would otherwise not have.

“This therefore allows them to act in a way prison is supposed to prevent them from doing.”