I’ve been dipping in and out of the Post Office Horizon inquiry on YouTube over the past few months. The questioning of the PO staff is fascinating and in phase 5, the inquiry is closing in on the most senior managers at and around board level. In the beginning, I was convinced the inquiry would find the board was largely ignorant of the problems that seemed endemic in the Fujitsu-designed and operated computer system. However, I’ve changed my mind. Senior people knew about the bugs, errors and defects and essentially chose to cover it up.
Some staff at both PO and Fujitsu will find themselves on criminal charges and a few could and should become acquainted with the inside of a prison cell.
However, I want to concentrate on one small, if very revealing cameo that emerged from questions put to the PO’s then legal counsel in 2103, Susan Crichton. This happens about 4 hours and 54 minutes in. Crichton comes across as one of the more reasonable witnesses (she quit in October 2013 after being criticised for the way she handled the independent investigation by the firm of forensic accountants called Second Sight), less defensive, and more willing to admit mistakes.
After the result of the SS investigation was published Ms Crichton had a one-to-one meeting with the then PO chair Alice Perkins, a former civil servant.
The meeting was ostensibly to reassure Crichton that she wouldn’t be made a scapegoat and that the board, including Perkins and the CEO Paula Vennells, supported her. The board was unhappy that the SS report found ‘issues’ with Horizon and came out only days after it had been seen by the PO.
Perkins later wrote a file note about the meeting in which she says this:
"I understood that SS’s investigation had to be independent but in the civil service there would have been someone marking it who was close to all the key people (SS, JA, JFSA) and knew what was going on between them. By the time I had found out that SS had, in effect, changed the [terms of reference] to which they were working, it was too late to retrieve the situation. The organisation and people in it should have had proper time to consider. [Susan] questioned my under of the end game and said the PO had seen the report days earlier; she had been contacted by the CEO while unwell about it and had come back from her holiday to handle it which had not been ideal.
"[Susan] said that as a lawyer it was inappropriate for her to influence key stakeholders. She would have been criticised had she become to close to them. I commented that if she felt unable to play that role she should have flagged that up and someone else could have been brought in to perform it (Privately, I am astonished I am astonished at this view which I simply do not recognise from my experience elsewhere)."
It should be remembered that Crichton was the person who brought in Second Sight to uncover the Horizon issues, the first real investigation that the PO had ever done despite prosecuting hundreds of sub-postmasters and mistresses for over a decade based on the disputed Horizon numbers.
Perkins was a senior civil servant at Health, The Treasury and The Cabinet Office before venturing out into the private sector, firstly on the board at British Airports Authority and then securing the plum job of PO chair in 2011. She joined the BBC Executive Board as a non-executive director on 1 April (?) 2014. She is also the wife of former Labour cabinet minister Jack Straw.
Perkins later sacked Second Sight although the High Court and now the public inquiry has shown they were absolutely bang on with their findings on Horizon. Without them, the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history would still be rumbling on.
What is astonishing to me is how Perkins thinks it's normal to 'influence' what is usually billed as 'independent' investigations but are nothing less than a bit of window dressing. This is like appointing your own jury and helping to write the judgment. She wanted to 'review' the findings, change the wording here and there, take the edge off things, exonerate the guilty, and heap blame on the innocent.
Lord knows what the campaigners at Justice for Sub-Postmaster would have thought about the Post Office 'reviewing' the findings before publication. They would have rightly been outraged.
If you were ever suspicious that an "independent inquiry" in the past might have been got at, you can take comfort in knowing you were probably right. Ms Perkins has done us all a favor.
Ukraine
It’s tremendous news that Ukraine is finally getting the $60 billion in US military aid after months of struggling to halt Russia’s advance in the east. Let's hope that with long-range missiles and the F16s coming from several European countries, Russia will finally be defeated.
It will be cathartic for Russia, having already lost somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 men either dead or wounded in the 2-year war in Ukraine.
On this subject, I noticed this response from Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, to the question: What would a defeated Russia look like? It's a longish answer but well worth a few minutes:
Q: What would a defeated Russia look like?Professor @TimothyDSnyder answers. pic.twitter.com/Q9IHkecI25— Intellectualist Videos - Official (@Intellect_Vids) April 21, 2024
He points out that empires and would-be empires only reform themselves into peaceful democracies after a heavy defeat and gave Germany in 1945, later the French in Vietnam, and the Dutch in Indonesia as recent examples, but you can go back to the Romans to find plenty of others.
Snyder argues that the West can't influence things inside Russia after a defeat but it can contribute to its defeat. It is absolutely essential to peace in Europe that Ukraine finally wins this war and wind decisively, otherwise Putin or his successors will be emboldened to believe aggression works.
He says there cannot be a democratic Russia without a democratic Ukraine and I'm sure that's true.
