To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

Jason Beer KC denounced Ron Warmington's choice of email font, Comic Sans, as "headache inducing".

My overall view is that many of the senior staff at the Post Office had not been trained to do their jobs to the necessary professional standards, that this had effectively corrupted the culture in the Post Office, so anyone demanding higher standards or doing anything to rock the boat would harm their career there to no purpose, and then the icing on the cake was for Horizon to be protected as the #1 priority, so that inadequate people with no sense of professionalism would do anything to support this because there were no safeguards in the culture of the organisation.

It's easy to see why Alan Bates sees the organisation as being irredeemable.

Just seen that someone else has already posted the comments concerned:

Also significant today was Paula Vennell's note of a meeting with Crichton. She wrote, "Susan was possibly more loyal to her professional conduct requirements and put her integrity as a lawyer above the interests of the business". This demonstrates clearly that Vennells was out of her depth. A lawyer is, first and foremost, an officer of the court regardless of who pays their wages. As such, Crichton was required to put her integrity ahead of Post Office's interests. Any half-decent CEO would know this.

Ultimately people just have to admit at the inquiry that they knew what was going on but they had mortgages to pay so they followed orders.

Ultimately that's what it all boils down to. I need my job and I don't care what happens to other people.

Yes, some of the comments made at the inquiry were quite telling on that score.

There is a group of in-house lawyers who've been lobbying the SRA about this for some time - before the ITV programme and before the post office scandal was quite so well known. Whether the SRA will take a blind bit of notice I don't know. They are utterly useless and arrogant (where have we heard that before).

She's very "little old me, I'm just here to help, and make tea and photocopy for the big boys and girls", isn't she?

As opposed to some of the men last week who were, "I'm a master of the universe and too important to have known the details of this stuff."

So many of them are behaving like there's a different Post Office Limited, through a door somewhere, where the real decisions are being made.

I wonder which tack Vennells will take: master of the universe or hapless, people-pleasing junior earnestly trying to help everyone but obedient to their boss.

My money's on the latter.

I know they're talking about a different issue here. She's so busy trying to defend on that front, that she's slipped on this one.

Woah! Did she just admit that she asked for Fujitsu to intervene to make a change on a branch's account?

She's talking about asking for a new ID to be assigned to the change, so that it will be separate from the SPM's entries: all well and good.

But in order to make such a request, she must have known, in 2013, that such remote intervention is possible.

I've not seen the ITV drama so that testimony about the Martin Griffiths case was new to me. Watching what went on and Bogerd's account was thoroughly depressing. As I imagine it was for the other 18000 people watching the Inquiry's stream on youtube.

She's very reminiscent of Liz Truss. Not me guv, I was right, everyone else wrong and I can't remember.

David Enright on Sky News this morning

Anna Jones: What did you & your clients make of Angela Van Den Bogerd evidence?

David Enright(represents sub-postmasters): "My clients have described her as the first lady of the flat earth society.. as she has a history of misleading the courts..."

https://x.com/Haggis_UK/status/1783746063486029925

Oh. It starts going in hard with the case of Martin Griffiths.

Today's livestream from the Inquiry:

I didn't believe her either!

I liked Mr Beer KC. He clearly did not believe her answer about the email in December 2010 because he kept coming back to it as if he was giving her many opportunities to change her response but all she did was dig a much deeper hole each time.

.

and this

This

"Did you forget about this email, too?" - splendid!

She's at the point where she's so deep in it that she feels it's too risky to tell the truth.

Yes, and more and more damning as the day wears on.

I can't watch it live so am trying to follow it via a live blog, it's all quite damning

There was a significant intervention by Sir Wyn Williams when he asked why Bogerd had not been open about Fujitsu access in the meeting with the SPM and she wcouldn't come up with an answer. What he was after there was the fact that most important thing that Bogerd did know, and what informed much of what she did in relation to her activities around Horizon, was to protect its reputation for being completely solid and reliable. It's clear that Williams is going to have this at the core of the report produced by the Inquiry, that lives were destroyed because the only thing that counted was for the Post Office to protect the reputation of Horizon.

Gosh this isn't going well. I'm cringing.

👋

I'm 35 minutes behind and slowly catching up. Nearly 14000 watching.

👋@ PerkingFaintly