Tuesday 7th February 2012 | 15:38

Times editor 'was not informed about High Court case'

The editor of the Times, James Harding, has claimed he wasn't informed that the paper were fighting a case in the High Court to unmask an anonymous blogger.

Mr Harding told the Leveson inquiry that the paper's legal manager, Alastair Brett, did not tell him about the privacy injunction case over the anonymous police blogger known as 'NightJack'.

"I had no idea that the case had been brought to court; I didn't know what the legal correspondence was; I didn’t know who’d been instructed, I didn’t know what the instructions were; I didn’t know the subject matter in the case,” he said.

He said it was "very, very unusual" that a case would be taken to court without senior management's knowledge.

In a lengthy cross-examination before the inquiry, Mr Harding apologised over the hacking of the blogger's email account by a journalist at the paper. 

In 2009 Patrick Foster, then a Times journalist, accessed the email account of the anonymous blogger in order to discover and reveal his identity.

Mr Harding said concerns were raised before the story was published about how Mr Foster had obtained the blogger's identity, but the paper, with his backing, took the decision to publish the story on "public interest" grounds.

"I wasn't aware exactly what he had done," said Mr Harding. "I was aware we had a concern about what he had done, but I was not aware exactly what he had done and that remained the case, to be honest, until we got all of these emails and all of this documentation in front of me in the last couple of weeks."

Mr Harding, who was appearing before Leveson for the second time, began by issuing an apology. "I sorely regret the intrusion into Richard Horton's email account by a journalist in our newsroom," he said. "On behalf of the newspaper, I apologise." 

He added that he does "not approve of the practice."

"If Mr Foster had come to me and said he had done this I would have told him to abandon the story," he said.

Intelligent deduction

It was revealed that Mr Foster informed the Times legal manager, Mr Brett, and was told to back up the story with a legitimate source. Mr Brett did not inform the Times senior management about Mr Foster’s email hack at that time.

After the 'NightJack' blogger attempted to take out an injunction on the story, Mr Foster claimed that he had not accessed the email account for information. The Times legal team told the High Court that Mr Horton had been identified through “intelligent deduction.”

Mr Justice Eady ruled at the time that no breach of confidence had occured, and turned down the request for an anonymity injunction. 

Mr Harding said he maintains the story did have a public interest, but not one sufficient enough to warrant intrusion into Mr Horton’s email account.

He said that he could now see that the paper "paid insufficient attention to this matter at the time."

"When you look back on this it's terrible...We take this inquiry very seriously and when we have learned new things we have brought them to your attention," he said.