My name is Richard Horton and for the last 17 years, I have worked for Lancashire Constabulary. For the last 12 years or so I have been a detective. There is really no other job that I have ever wanted to do. However, for the last 18 months, I have led a double life as the author of a well known anonymous police blog called NightJack.

It all began around December 2007 when I began to read blogs for the first time. I read blogs by police officers from all over the UK. They were writing about the frustrations and the pleasures of what we all refer to as “The Job”. As I read, I began to leave comments until some of those comments were as long as the original posts. Reading and responding made me start to consider my personal feelings about “The Job”. So it was that in February 2008, I made a decision to start blogging for myself as NightJack. That decision has had consequences far beyond anything that I then imagined possible.

My head-on accounts of investigating serious crime and posts on how I believed policing should work within society seemed to strike a chord and my readership slowly grew to around 1,500 a day. I got a book offer but I turned it down because my blog was never about making money.

By January 2009, it felt like I was starting to repeat myself and looking back now, my writing had clearly taken on a harshly critical political edge so I decided to stop writing the blog. Then, unexpectedly, in February 2009 I was long listed for the Orwell Prize. In March 2009 NightJack made it on to the shortlist. I realised that what had begun as a set of personal ruminations was achieving a life of its own. I cannot deny that I was happy with the recognition, but at the same time I had the feeling that the Orwell Prize was a big, serious, very public event. Win, lose or draw, my blog was about to move out of the relatively small world of the police blogosphere and get a dose of national attention.

The morning after I won the award, there was a leader in The Guardian and a full page in The Sun. The readership went up to 60,000 a day (more people have read NightJack since I stopped writing it than ever read it whilst it was live). My e-mail inbox had offers from newspapers, literary agents, publishers and people who wanted to talk about film rights and TV adaptations.

There was a lot of attention heading towards my blog and I was nervous that somehow, despite my efforts to remain unknown, my identity would come out. As an anonymous blogger, I was just another policing Everyman but if it came out that I worked in Lancashire, I knew that some of my writing on government policy, partner agencies, the underclass and criminal justice would be embarrassing for the Constabulary. Also, as an anonymous police blogger I was shielded from any consequences of my actions but without the protection of that anonymity, there were clearly areas where I would have to answer for breaches in the expected standards of behaviour for police officers.

During the next month I began to relax a little. It felt like everything was going to work out and my identity would stay secret. I contacted one of the literary agents and said that the blog was not for sale at any price and that I wouldn’t be trading on the Orwell Prize. There was press and TV attention but nobody seemed to want to publicise who was behind my blog.

Then one morning I heard a rumour that The Times had sent a photographer to my home. Later in the afternoon came the inevitable phone calls from The Times, first to me and then to Lancashire Constabulary asking for confirmation that I was the author of the NightJack blog. That was easily the worst afternoon of my life. I knew that it was serious and quite rightly my employers have investigated it as a matter of misconduct. With that under way, I went to court to stop The Times from publishing my name, my photograph or any personal details about my home and my family. Over the years, I have dealt with some unpleasant characters. I know that some of them have made determined but unsuccessful efforts to find me and I believe that some of them are still looking. I didn’t want their task made easier. I also wanted to provide some breathing space for my employers so that they could try to limit the damage that my exposure will do to their deserved reputation as one of the best police forces in the country. In the event, I failed at court as it was decided that the public right to know about me outweighed any claim to personal privacy.

My blog is gone now, deleted, slowly melting away post by post as it drops off the edge of the Google cache. The Police Dependants’ Trust is a few thousand pounds better off which may be the only good thing to have come out of this. 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. Next to that, my own career prospects are trivial.

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