Night Jack blog detective issued written warning by police bosses

A policeman who used an anonymous blog to post personal opinions on the force and criticise government ministers has received a written warning but is unlikely to face further disciplinary action.

Richard Horton was revealed as the author of the Night Jack blog yesterday, when a high court judge refused to grant him a temporary injunction to prevent the Times naming him.

The Orwell prize-winning blog has since been closed down, with a message on the homepage today reading: "The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available."

The 45-year-old detective constable with the Lancashire constabulary has been spoken to and received a written warning but will not be disciplined further "unless anything else was to come out", a spokeswoman for Lancashire police said.

"We have conducted a full internal investigation and the officer accepts that parts of his public commentary have fallen short of the standards of professional behaviour we expect of our police officers," she said.

Horton said today that his blog "seemed to strike a chord" but that his decision to write it "had consequences far beyond anything that I then imagined possible".

"My family life has changed in ways that they did not want and that is down to me. I deeply and bitterly regret the damage that will be done to the reputation of Lancashire constabulary, that is also down to me," he wrote in the Times.

He said he went to court to try to stop the Times revealing his identity because of fear that it would help "unpleasant characters" he had encountered trying to trace him and to provide "breathing space" for his employers to try to limit the damage caused by his exposure.

Refusing to grant Horton anonymity, Justice Eady said that blogging was "essentially a public rather than a private activity".

He also ruled that any right of privacy on the part of the blogger would be likely to be outweighed by the public interest in revealing that a particular police officer had been making such contributions.

Horton's lawyer said that thousands of people who communicated via the internet under a cloak of anonymity would be horrified to think that the law would do nothing to protect their identities.

While acknowledging that may be true, the judge said there was still a need to demonstrate that there would be a legally enforceable right to maintain anonymity, in the absence of a genuine breach of confidence.

The mere fact that Night Jack wished to remain anonymous did not mean either that he had a reasonable expectation of doing so, or that the Times was under an enforceable obligation to him in that respect, he said.

"Those who wish to hold forth to the public by this means often take steps to disguise their authorship, but it is in my judgment a significantly further step to argue, if others are able to deduce their identity, that they should be restrained by law from revealing it," said Eady.

The judge said that it had always been apparent to Horton that if Lancashire constabulary became aware that one of its officers was communicating to the public in such a way, there would be a significant risk of disciplinary action.

He rejected the idea that it was part of the court's function to protect police officers who were, or thought they might be, acting in breach of police discipline regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors.