To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

Yip.

It's so blatant that they are lying to the inquiry.

Yes absolutely. You can see he's quick enough in areas he's comfortable with. Then his speech sloowsss riiigghhtt doowwnnnn for bits where he's worried. I think we're basically getting the "please hold" music while he tries to work out the safest thing to say.

Well, that and the fact the safest thing to say is nothing at all, in as many words as possible...

And when he's really bang up against it, he can't understand the question.

This witness is clear, concise and articulate in his contemporaneous emails. Brutally clear. Ten years later on the stand he dithers, can't remember, can't follow the question, says the same incoherent waffle over and over again. Flat out denies what is written in front of him in black and white. To the point that I was starting to wonder if he was trying to avoid facing the music by suggesting some sort of cognitive decline.

And then Mr Beer said ah, your answer is two questions in front of me, Mr Singh. I'm not there yet, but you're thinking ahead aren't you Mr Singh.

Shameless.

Does he not listen to himself?

Well, the content is the same, but the tune is better...

Are you saying that we should just watch that on loop instead?

I'd not noticed the tie, yes, it is splendid. But poor Mr Beer, doing this arduous task with a rotten cold.

I'm taking refuge in staring at Mr Beer's soothing tie.

Would you like to have a bigger headache? If so, watch the confusing world of Jarnail Singh.

I'm wondering whether today will finally see Jason Beer KC lose his patience.

I have a headache today. Do I dare watch this...?

Strap in for a day of bizarre witness testimony by Jarnail Singh. He was head of criminal prosecutions at the Post Office. Today's it's Jason Beer KC as counsel so there should be some robust questioning.

More shameful evidence today. There was the standard stuff about lawyers (at the very least) bending the rules to stitch up subpostmasters but two things stood out particularly. One was the attempt to make sure that evidence to exonerate Seema Misra was withheld from her, years after her conviction, possibly because her conviction has been seen as the original "test case" on which the entire Post Office cover-up was based. The other was that lawyers acting for the Post Office held a private meeting with a judge on the eve of a trial of a subpostmaster to obtain public interest immunity for the Second Sight interim report so that the defendant would be unaware of it. I cannot comprehend how they got away with the latter of these.

For me this is an utterly compelling watch.

One of the lowest points in today's testimony (from solicitor Martin Smith) was when the lid was blown off (knowledge of the Second Sight interim report becoming public), the Criminal Cases Review Commission wrote to Paula Vennells asking WTF had been going on and as a result Post Office's external lawyers, Cartwright King, sent a draft response for the Post Office to send to the CCRC to mislead them.

As time went on today Martin Smith hid more and more behind "a big boy wrote it and ran away", the big boy being barrister Simon Clarke. Clarke's evidence on 9 May is therefore going to be fascinating.

I second that!

Thank you for taking one for the team and watching, nauticant.

I've been overwhelmed dealing with other idiots the last few days, and haven't had any energy left to listen to this life-sapping drivel by self-serving idiots.

Well, this is a thoroughly depressing day of evidence from the Post Office's external lawyers about holding back documents from trials in which subpostmasters were about to lose everything, with the justification being things like disclosure requests being too broad or the lawyers receiving critical emails but then not bothering to read them and making convenient assumptions that there would be nothing damaging contained within them. Also, when everything came to light not, at an incredibly late stage, acting to notify convicted subpostmasters that there were documents that they should have been provided with for their defence in their trials.

I don't know about perverting the course of justice but these people should be struck off.

Harry Bowyer stating clearly that he doesn't view the word "bandwagon" as being prejorative, in the sense where it was used to refer to the fact that subpostmasters were separately and all over the country arguing that there was something wrong with the Horizon system. He'd sort of been doing OK-ish (relatively speaking for witnesses in the Inquiry) till then but this marks him out as yet another witness who will refuse to engage properly with the part he played in the scandal.

Yes I caught that bit of Flemington notably failing notice Singh.

Happily I've had to go off and do other things this afternoon, rather than let these tedious teflon twats drone more of my life away.

I recognise it's nice to have the choice. What life must have been like for the poor bloody SPMs looking up and realising their lives were being completely controlled by arseholes of this (lack of) calibre... <shudder>

Major evasion by Hugh Flemington about the competence of Jarnail Singh. That's another reason why the scandal happened, they'd put Singh in charge of the legal side of prosecution and then hoped to forget about it, and even though they knew he was incompetent and dangerous, they put that out of their minds and let him carry on, and now are acutely embarrassed when asked about them not having acted to control Singh.

Just now at the Inquiry:

Counsel for Inquiry: Did you form a view on Jarnail Singh at this time?

Hugh Flemington: No. I just noticed the emotive language used in the email.

See! Again, the legal people at Post Office/Royal Mail are being asked to comment on Singh's competence and none of them want to go there.

Shame the BBC isn't updating the examinnations - I can't watch live today..

If you've been watching the hearings you might have noticed that counsel to the Inquiry, especially Jason Beer KC, has asked a number of witnesses who worked with Jarnail Singh what they thought about his capabilities and professionalism. The witnesses have either been non-committal or have changed the subject. This is because if they were to be honest they'd then be asked "So why didn't you speak up and say that he should not be in such an important role?"

Singh gives exceptional testimony. For example, it's common that when he's asked about an email with his name on that he wants to disown he'll claim that a big boy wrote it and ran away.

Oh I'm sorry, I'm now laughing at the whole of that Nick Wallis post about Jarnail Singh.

I know it's not funny – really, really not – and the devastation he caused. But... I'm just giggling slightly hysterically because, well, other than screaming what other reaction is there?

One of the comments on the blog has it to a T:
“Mr Singh is clearly as mad as a three-cornered bat. The fact that he has held a senior position at the Post Office for most of his working life tells us something. If we didn’t know it already.”