Leveson says Times's Night Jack evidence 'utterly misleading'

The Times was today accused by Lord Justice Leveson of providing an "utterly misleading" witness statement to a court, claiming that a journalist identified the author of the anonymous Night Jack police blog through legitimate means, and not through computer hacking.

The paper's former legal manager Alastair Brett conceded that some of the statement, by journalist Patrick Foster, "certainly doesn't give the full story" and expressed regret about the way the case was handled.

The Times went to the high court in 2009 to fight an injunction preventing it from identifying DC Richard Horton as the author of the blog. It argued at the time that the story had been obtained through journalistic endeavour and was in the public interest.

Brett told the Leveson inquiry that he had been put in a "ghastly horrible difficult situation" when Foster first told him he had identified Horton by hacking into his email account.

Foster's witness statement, outlining the work he did to identify Horton, includes a line saying he "began" by comparing the Night Jack blog against newspaper cuttings service Factiva.

"That's not accurate," Leveson told the inquiry today. Brett replied: "It is not entirely accurate, no."

Lord Justice Leveson went on to say that parts of the witness statement were "utterly misleading", to which Brett replied: "It certainly doesn't give the full story."

The inquiry heard that, before the case reached court, an email sent by Brett to DC Horton's legal team described allegations that Foster had "a history of making unauthorised access into email accounts" as "baseless".

Brett told the Leveson inquiry today: "Baseless was not the best word to use. I don't think I should have used the word baseless, with hindsight."

Leveson asked: "Don't you feel that in failing to engage with a perfectly reasonable question [about computer hacking], the court was in danger of being misled?"

Brett replied that, in the email: "I'm being oblique to an extent which is embarrassing."

Brett said that when he first heard about the hacking, he believed the story might be covered by the public interest defence in the Data Protection Act. He was not aware of the Computer Misuse Act.

He told the inquiry: "If [Foster] or any other journalist could identify Night Jack through legitimate sources and information in the public domain then we've got what I felt was a perfectly legitimate public interest story.

"He had to demonstrate to me that he could do it legitimately from outside in, and that's what he did. He persuaded me that he was able, that the only person who had been Night Jack was DC Horton."

However, Robert Jay QC said Foster "had the advantage of knowing the answer to his question" and it was "a much easier exercise".

Brett agreed, but denied that the exercise to find Night Jack through legal means was just "cosmetic".

Asked why the Times did not mention the email hacking in court, Brett said: "Rightly or wrongly I believed you could separate the earlier misconduct by Mr Foster and you can then say that once he had done this legitimately you could present this to the court as having done it legally."

He added: "I was prepared to put on one side that he earlier hacked the email account. I didn't think he had to make an admission that he had committed a criminal offence, or not as the case may be, depending on the public interest element to it."

"Perhaps I was making a wrong decision, but I was compartmentalising it."

Times editor James Harding apologised last month for the hacking incident, saying a lot of the evidence had only come to his attention recently.

Harding has written to Mr Justice Eady to apologise that the full details about how the story was obtained were not disclosed to the court in 2009.

He said the case was taken to the high court without him - or the paper's deputy or managing editor - being informed beforehand.

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