To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

[5foot5]

There is already a thread about this on the Telly Addicts forum here

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/telly_addicts/4970440-mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-mon-to-thur-itv-9pm-tv-pace-no-spoilers

However this seems like such an important subject that I thought I would draw attention to it on AIBU.

The first episode aired tonight but the whole series is available on itvx.

Most of you will no doubt have heard about the Horizon scandal, but whether you have or you haven't this program is compelling. It will probably make you furious but it deserves as wide an audience as possible.,

Massive weasel alert. Today's witness (Mark Davies, former Group Communications & Corporate Affairs Director at Post Office Ltd) is hiding behind management and comms speak and is denying the obvious being put in front of him by counsel to the Inquiry.

This bloke comes across as being incapable of answering questions honestly. But then that's what his role was at the Post Office.

That was a punishing start. Counsel skimmed through a long witness statement written in management speak talking about openess to challenge, care, and all that kind of bollocks, and then Counsel took to the witness to email after email showing underhand and callous moves to obscure and hide information, eg renaming of the term "bugs", hiding the name of Horizon, dodging interviews, and in each case Counsel asked the witness if what they were looking at was evidence of a culture open to challenge.

But this witness seems to be impossible to shame. He excuses everything away.

Thank you so much for the reporting, nauticant. I'm definitely not fit enough to watch today.

I'm currently absolutely flattened from dealing with Ombudsman paperwork about utility company; immigration bureaucracy x 2 for various friends; tradesman messing me around re urgent and essential job; the enforced telecoms switchover from copper to VOIP has buggered my call-screener and I'm now fielding daily scammers (which I have to pick up in case it's tradesman or immigration); and I haven't had the strength to get back to my ongoing ICO complaint.

If I try to watch this wanker, who appears to encapsulate the worst of all of the above, my few remaining braincells will just put themselves out of their misery...

This guy isn't giving anything away.

In 2010:

Davies, 43, is still getting used to his new life after five years working as a special adviser to former Justice Secretary Jack Straw. Following Labour's defeat in May's general election, Davies found himself jobless and looking for a fresh challenge.

Note that Alice Perkins, who, as Post Office Chairman, worked together with Paula Vennells in a mean girls duo, driving the General Counsel out of the business, is married to Jack Straw.

Well, OK, I shouldn't be that shocked. It's all jobs for the boys and girls...

At one early point, Counsel to the Inquiry was asking Mark Davies why his draft press release about the Second Sight interim report presented such a distorted version of the report (some uncharitable people could say that the press release was full of lies):

MD: I think if I was writing it again I would write it more, I would be more um I would be clearer.

Counsel: Is that because you would now be more ethical than you were at the time?

MD: No.

Counsel: You have have entirely removed the sting from the report haven't you?

MD: No, I don't believe so, and I think again I'd say that because we were publishing the report itself in its entirety I think it's uh reasonable to say that the report would therefore be in the public domain.

Counsel: You were working for a company that was wholly owned by the government. Did you think that it was appropriate in those circumstances to spin the report in this way?

MD: I reject the word spin uh I wasn't seeking to spin. I I don't recall whether this is the final press release that we issued. I don't know what processes it went through after this point and it probably went through a number of different colleagues, um I was seeking probably too hurriedly to uh put together a summary of the report but but absolutely doing so in full and certain knowledge that we would be publishing the full report so it would be there for for uh the public and others to make, to draw their conclusions.

Counsel: Mr Davis I I won't use the word spin. Uh, do you think it was appropriate to lie the way that you have on the right hand side in the press release?

MD: I think, I don't believe that I've lied there.

Counsel: Do you think working for a company that was wholly owned by the government that is an appropriate press release to have drafted having read the report on the left hand side?

MD: I think if I'm guilty of anything there it's for it of being sloppy. I've never lied in my entire career and uh certainly didn't lie at any point during this, over this issue either.

It's the Homer Simpson defence, lie about everything then claim it's your first day when you are caught out.

All of them.

Just now starting to catch up with today. Lesley Sewell, former Chief Information Officer at Post Office, came to the witness stand in tears and absolutely terrified.

How did he get on after that?

Teary all the way through, with moments of it looking like she was going to collapse into shock. Overall, in a sea of liars, she didn't look to be going out of her way to mislead the Inquiry.

She was another one who fell victim to Vennells doing her Lady Macbeth routine, related to which see some interesting background here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm5454yypxxo

Going back a few days to Mark Davies (former Group Communications & Corporate Affairs Director at Post Office) what was clear was that Counsel asking questions and the retired judge leading the Inquiry, Sir Wyn Williams, loathed the man. Probably because he'd enthusiastically embraced the task of misleading people in the interests of covering up the scandal. In fact, he saw that as his job. The only other comparable loathing I've seen is for the bent lawyers who were willing to corrupt the legal process to benefit Post Office.

At the end of Davies's evidence, Sir Wyn Williams was so sick of hearing from him that he sharply called a halt to the proceedings making it clear he wouldn't permit any questions from other Counsel in the room, a major break from established practice, which would have led to even more dissembling from Davies.

On the following day, Sir Wyn Williams, knowing that he'd let irritation get the better of him and having done something he shouldn't have done, apologised to everyone (although I don't think Davies was included in the apology).

in 2013, following news that former subpostmaster Martin Griffith was critically ill in hospital after attempting to take his own life, one of the first things Davies did was to tell the Post Office’s general counsel of the need to find a specialist media lawyer. At the time, Griffiths was being forced to repay unexplained account shortfalls on the Horizon system and was losing his Post Office branch. Griffiths died in hospital weeks later.

I've have just started following this when I can and have been listening to some of the older evidence that I've missed. I spotted this in Jarnail Singh's first evidence last year:-

Jarnail Singh: It was an open-plan office. We had the head of Legal, which was – I’ve forgotten his name now, Hugh Flemington, I think it was, and the director of – or counsel was Susan Crichton. She was a lovely lady, and Hugh, we got on really well. As and when we needed it, needed them to discuss matters, I did. I said, “Look, you know, I can’t deal with it the way it is, the way I want to do it”, because the whole point was it was a challenge and I have always been up for challenges.

Jarnail Singh: Yeah, I don’t know any of them. I mean, even Susan Crichton, I have probably met her. I didn’t know her. Certainly – any of them. I mean, Mandy Talbot I know because I think she was in the civil litigation in the same building and Impact House at Croydon. Hugh Flemington, I don’t know who he was. I mean, subsequently when I joined the – the Post Office Limited on 1 April ‘12, I’ve never met him. I don’t know who he was.

If he can't remember whether or not he knew Susan Crichton & Hugh Flemington, how on earth can any of the rest of his evidence be accepted as truthful (not that I could work out what he was saying most of the time . . . . )

Catching up with today's evidence. Which had an unusual start:

😂

Thanks for the updates

This is a morning of blistering evidence, albeit delivered in measured tones. If Alisdair Cameron (Chief Financial Officer and former Interim Chief Executive of Post Office) is to be believed, he arrived late in the day, was horrified at what he found, and tried to get the very top people to open their eyes and stop listening to lawyers who for some reason were advising to fight on when it was clear to anyone not brainwashed that the case had already been lost, and lost some time before.

The lawyers - and we have seen some very slimy examples so far - are often able to abuse the system to their advantage.
However, when that approach fails, the senior management seem to double-down like cult members, believing that the situation will somehow be transformed to their advantage.
As happened with Equitable Life here and BP in the US, the Post Office despite (or perhaps due to) being government-owned appears to have had nobody of integrity at the helm.
Incredibly, some companies attempt the failed approach numerous times, like Boeing blaming pilot error for the Lauda Air and 737-Max tragedies before being found out.

The way it worked with the Post Office is that the top people decided that to save the organisation, ie their own skins, they needed to win the litigation against the Group Legal case (the 555 subpostmasters), and clung onto this even past the point where it was clear they'd lost. This was entangled with the fact that rather than choose a top tier law firm to advise and run the litigation, they'd gone with Bond Dickenson, a 2nd tier legal firm (possibly doing things on the cheap as a disastrous false economy).

Since the income from the Post Office litigation was such a massive part of BD's revenue, they went along with giving the top people at the Post Office what they wanted, ie to maintain the delusion about winning, and thus corrupted themselves, whereas a top tier firm would more likely have had the independence to go with providing sensible legal advice because this would preserve their own reputation, even though it wouldn't be what the top Post Office people would want to hear.

According to Alisdair Cameron, this is what he walked into and he could not get his head around the fact that such a vast legal case was being run by those in a grip of self-delusion.

Related to that is the latest from Nick Wallis. The General Counsel who was in charge of the disastrous civil litigation, Jane MacLeod, has put herself beyond the jurisdiction of the Inquiry and is taking advantage of being in a foreign country to avoid having to explain her key involvement:

https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/former-post-office-general-counsel-refuses-to-cooperate-with-inquiry/

About to start watching Alwen Lyons, former Company Secretary of Post Office. The evidence so far hasn't given much away about what she'll say today but I get the impression she'll come across as an enabler of the two main mean girls, Vennells and Perkins.

Speaking of which, it's a massive week of testimony with 3 days of Paula Vennells starting tomorrow.

With it being such a big week, I hope you're not still so oppressed at the moment@PerkingFaintlyand you'll be able to watch some of the testimony.

Jesus Christ, she's useless.

Written in advance but I expect this to be close to the mark:

https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/sleepy-lyons/

I'm just at the point@Quirkymewhere Julian Blake KC was asking Lyons about a load of critical functions and how their reporting would get to the board and in every single case it seems that those functions were not represented by a particular board member and so there was no formal route for information to get to the board, and so for this to happen somehow the leaders of those functions would need to get into meetings of the board. (And we've seen evidence of how even the General Counsel, Susan Crichton, would have to wait outside the boardroom for ages in the hope of getting inside only to be snubbed.)

One thing that will get members of the board off the hook is the way they made sure they were insulated away from as much bad news as possible. It'll get them a complete bollocking over failures in corporate governance when the report of the Inquiry is published but that's only reputational harm and their reputations are largely in the shit in any case.