Paula Vennells is history but now at the Post Office Inquiry is Fujitsu distinguished engineer Gareth Jenkins - thread 4

[nauticant]

A continuation of this thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5094266-paula-vennells-was-done-the-other-week-the-post-office-inquiry-is-now-questioning-associates-and-others-thread-3

When the hearings are going on, live-streaming can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947/featured

All of the previous hearings can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947/videos

The civil service are good at losing inconvenient records.

I love Jason Beer's question to Cable re George Thomson (Gen Sec of the NFSP):

"Did he strike you as a tool [pause] a tool of the PO?"

"Did he strike you as a tool [pause] a tool of the PO?"

There's definitely a Yes, Minister on the civil service losing inconvenient records.

Ah, it's The Skeleton in the Cupboard:

Hacker: How am I going to explain the missing documents to the Mail?
Sir Humphrey: Well, this is what we normally do in circumstances like these.
[passes Hacker a memo]
Hacker: "This file contains the complete set of papers, except for a number of secret documents, a few others which are part of still active files, some correspondence lost in the floods of 1967..." Was 1967 a particularly bad winter?
Sir Humphrey: No, a marvellous winter. We lost no end of embarrassing files.
Hacker: "...Some records which went astray in the move to London and others when the War Office was incorporated in the Ministry of Defence, and the normal withdrawal of papers whose publication could give grounds for an action for libel or breach of confidence or cause embarrassment to friendly governments". That's pretty comprehensive. How many does that normally leave for them to look at?
[Humphrey shrugs]
Hacker: How many does it actually leave? About a hundred?... Fifty?... Ten?... Five?... Four?... Three?... Two?... One?... Zero?
Sir Humphrey: Yes, Minister.

In a way I preferred Margot James' evidence yesterday where she didn't make (much of) a pretence about having made efforts to get to the bottom of things.

Also, I'm getting utterly sick of Cable blaming others. Especially when counsel asks whether Cable is blaming others which gets an immediate indignant response from Cable that he's not. This kind of thing makes him come across as slippery and dishonest.

What he's doing is fighting to avoid his legacy being (more) muddied. Which explains the (sort of) "how very dare you!" tone.

Many of the witnesses from the governments at the time, from ShEx, and from UKGI, when presented with evidence of inaction, said that this was them carrying out their role properly because they had strategic but not operational responsibility. This line seemed to have been trotted out for years. Yet here's Cable saying that the cause of his inaction was no one coming to him with the problem, and had they done so he'd have been able to intervene.

Allan Leighton (former Chair of Royal Mail Holdings plc; former Chair and former Non Executive Director of Post Office Ltd; and former Non Executive Director of Royal Mail Group) being questioned about the boards of Post Office and Royal Mail having having largely kept themselves in the dark about the prosecutions of subpostmasters. Broadly speaking he takes the view that there was nothing to stop the functions below the Board in bringing relevant matters to the attention of the Board.

That's Leighton done. The whole of that session was about asking whether the Boards should have been aware with Leighton explaining why they shouldn't have been. Sir Wyn Williams ended up a bit grumpy over how long it had taken.

Let's see what happens with Martin Edwards.

Ex-civil service, joined Post Office in 2012, and is saying that all he did in his role was to act as a conduit for information to flow between important people who were the decision-makers. There have been quite a few people whose role in Post Office was as a conduit.

He's still at Post Office, now in a senior strategy role.

Ahh, he was pushing the line that the Second Sight interim report was "misleading" before anyone had seen it. Mr Blake asks how he'd come to this view and he's effectively shrugging and saying he's picked it up from a vague group of others.

It turns out that legal positions, to persuade MPs, we're being drafted by Edwards together with the PR guy, and then fed to Susan Crichton, general counsel. I'm going to have to read carefully the dictionary definition of conduit because I clearly don't understand it correctly.

This is really awkward for Edwards. He's sensible enough not to dismiss serious matters, and is still middle management with many years to do, but he got himself well out of his depth back in 2013 and has shown that his conduit explanation in his witness statement is far from being true.

No wonder Sir Wyn Williams was impatient to get the first witness out of the way, to have more time for this one.

As ever, when it comess to the post-2012 cover-up, Mark Davies' fingerprints are all over the place.

I'm just joining the livestream. Thanks for the catch-up, @nauticant.

Don't bother with Leighton. There's nothing there. Start with Edwards, and crank up to 1.5x speed to get up to contemporaneous evidence.

Yes, Martin, why would it be a concern if the Board started asking questions about past prosecutions?

He's all over the place trying to explain his (then) use of 'don't want to set hares running' [re Second Sight Report implications].

I think I'll watch ME's first part of evidence at lunchtime. I'm already gripped in real time here ...

It's well worth going to the first part, about an hour back from now. The beauty of his evidence comes out best when you see it unfold.

ME calls the BBC 'Arse holes' in an email.

I think we all know who are the arseholes. 😡

Catching up with ME quickly now. Well worth it, as you said, nauticant.

Edwards actually wrote in an email: ' ... the MPs have been poisoned by accounts from SPMRs ...'

The "conduit" language is interesting - several other witnesses have used this terminology. Must be an agreed term in PO or lawyers to downplay liability - if you are a "conduit" you are merely the passage through which information flows and not the start or end point.

Just popping in to say thank you to all for the commentary. I’m not able to watch this week, hope to catch up later.

If you have to prioritise, Baroness Neville-Rolfe and Martin Edwards ahead of the others giving evidence.

Resumes at 13.50 + 3 minute YouTube delay.

Yay, it's discussion of the flotation. The hearts of people on the Post Office side must sink when this topic comes up.