I would be delighted to help in any way I can. I did it for a number of years at the Times when we did precisely that. We offered fast-track arbitration of meaning and other issues, and I had at least up to a dozen cases where we did just ...

Yes.

Of course I do.

I would have done anything. And I mean, if you'd been in the room with Patrick Foster and me and what I said to him, I mean the air was blue.

I can totally understand that. I can say nothing more than in 33 years that I was at the Times, this was the one and only case I had. And God, I wish I could have done without it.

Yes.

I know.

That is precisely what your Inquiry is looking into.

No.

My Lord, I am certainly not, and I don't believe I ever have adopted a "the end justifies the means" approach. I would always obviously look at whether or not there was a public interest in a story which had been obtained either in breach of confidence or some ...

Mm.

No, other than the fact that I thought I knew the precise legal issues of the law of confidence and privacy reasonably well and I took a view that I didn't think DC Horton would take the case to court, but he did, I got that wrong. Other than ...

My Lord, I -- all of what you've just said I could have done. I wish I had done.

That was --

I know, but I didn't want to put him -- I felt I'd been put into this invidious situation. A journalist had come and told me he'd done something wrong, he'd done something clearly which I thought was illegal. Then I have a duty to the newspaper ...

My Lord, I can do nothing other than say, with hindsight and expert advice -- I mean, I will readily admit I think I should have gone to -- now, with hindsight, I should have gone and got a second opinion from another barrister, someone senior and as well equipped to advise ...

That's right.

That was clearly not going to work, because the Teare hearing, Mr Justice Teare was obviously of the view that there was a breach of confidence of some kind.

That's right, yes.

But can I just say that you could -- I mean, that was the balancing exercise and he had got it legitimately.

That is correct, yes.

I think it still would have been in the public interest. I mean, David Eady made it perfectly clear that he thought that a police officer who was breaching police regulations should be named.

Yes.

Patrick Foster might have been prosecuted. David Eady's analysis of the legal issues should have remained exactly the same, as it turned out --

I told him, "Don't engage on that, just keep it simple, say how you did it legitimately."

He has certainly skirted the issues. As I'd said to Patrick, "Don't engage with the other side." The other side had been saying, "We suspect that he has accessed our client's computer."

No, because, as I keep on saying, he'd done it legitimately.

It certainly doesn't give the full story.

No, of course I'd want you to be precise. It's not the full story.

Yes.

My Lord, we're being fantastically precise.

It is not entirely accurate, no.

Yes.

It certainly suggests he has done precisely that, yes.

Yes, it certainly does suggest --

Sorry, I don't have the right page.

My Lord, all I can do is, rightly or wrongly, I had believed that you could separate the earlier misconduct by Mr Patrick Foster and you could then say, once he had done this legitimately, that could be presented to the court perfectly properly as he had done it legally ...

Witness statement.

Well, Hugh Tomlinson accepted that at the --

Yes, that became one of the issues at the hearing on the 28th, yes. It was quite clear that the court needed to know that he could be identified from information in the public domain.

Yes, I do.

Patrick, by this stage, had also been able to see that there had been a Facebook conversation between Patrick and --

We might, but it still begs the question how on earth you get to the point of saying DC Horton is NightJack.

Well, I'm so sorry, but that did not occur to me. I believed that we could quite separate out the clean issues of whether or not the law of privacy was going to extend to protect bloggers, particularly where there was a public interest in actually naming that particular ...

Well --

We couldn't do that because, as happened on the Thursday before Mr Justice Teare, we -- Jonathan Barnes was trying to explain how you could identify DC Horton through perfectly legitimate --

I do not believe that this was relevant to the clear legal issues of what went to David Eady and the issue as to whether a blogger has a reasonable expectation of privacy or not.

He clearly had recently hacked, yes.

I don't think I should have used the word "baseless", with hindsight.

Yes, I clearly knew that, yes.