Post Office toxicity spreads….
Good evening.
Four things for you to consider tonight:
1. The Curse of AvdB is confirmed.
2. The Post Office Horizon system and the way the courts deal with IT will be in the parliamentary spotlight at 11am tomorrow.
3. The Judicial Review application hearing scheduled for Thursday is still currently on.
4. Computer Weekly has reported that the government will change the rules on private prosecutions in the light of the Horizon scandal.
Off we go:
1. Piers Morgan was not today’s only high profile resignation. The Chief Executive of the Football Association of Wales (FAW) has also been stood down. I wouldn’t normally be straying into sports news, but it seems the reason Jonathan Ford is leaving is partly because he saw fit to hire Angela van den Bogerd as the FAW’s “head of people”.
FAW council members were aghast, especially as many of them did not know Ms van den Bogerd had been hired until they saw an S4C report telling them as much. As a result they subjected Mr Ford to a vote of no confidence, which he lost.
Angela van den Bogerd is well known to many readers readers of this newsletter. She sat in court for every day of both Bates v Post Office High Court trials and was the most senior Post Office employee to be cross-examined. After the first trial, the judge found she had attempted to mislead him. Last year, she quietly left the Post Office, but it didn’t take long for her to pitch up at the FAW.
Trying to mislead a judge in court is a serious thing, but it does seem as if the entire British establishment is determined not to hold anyone at the Post Office to account for the miscarriages of justice which saw so many people erroneously sent to prison.
I expect if the FAW didn’t have a council structure, staffed with grassroots volunteers, which has some actual power, Ms van den Bogerd would enjoy the same executive protections afforded to other high-profile people who preside over corporate disasters. As it is, she’s still there, though we’ll see for how much longer.
Duff IT in the spotlight
2. Darren Jones MP, chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) select committee, is leading a short debate in parliament’s Westminster Hall at 11am tomorrow. I know Mr Jones has been working with the barristers Paul Marshall (former counsel for three appellant Subpostmasters) and Stephen Mason on trying to developing the law to properly reflect the efficacy of the vastly complex IT systems that increasingly encroach into our businesses and lives. I first interviewed Stephen Mason about this very subject eight years ago when reviewing Second Sight’s interim report about the Horizon system. Paul and Stephen are on the money. If Mr Jones is taking up cudgels in parliament, interesting things could happen. You can watch Mr Jones make his speech on parliament.tv here. Junior minister Matt Warman MP is expected to reply on behalf of the government.
Judicial review hearing is go
3. Chirag Sidhpura’s Judicial Review application into the Post Office’s Historical Shortfall Scheme at the High Court will take place on Thursday. I will get confirmation tomorrow as to whether or not I will be able to attend (virtually), live-tweet and examine both parties skeleton arguments. After 17 Dec’s very strange decision at the Court of Appeal who knows whether I will get access to the hearing or the documents, but the signs are good.
State oversight of private prosecutions
4. One of the biggest failures of governance in this whole affair is the government’s decision to leave the Post Office to its own devices, despite being its sole shareholder. There was no one holding the Post Office to account throughout the 2000s. If there was, someone might have asked why it was prosecuting so many people.
Despite the scandal it seems no official body (not even the CPS) has been keeping proper tabs on the growing number of private prosecutions over the last ten years.
The mighty Karl Flinders from Computer Weekly has written a piece confirming the government has been persuaded by a Justice select committee report (prompted by the Horizon disaster) to belatedly set up a register of private prosecutions.
Both Ron Warmington and Ian Henderson from Second Sight and Sandip Patel QC (who is representing a number of Subpostmasters at the Court of Appeal) gave oral evidence to the inquiry which produced the report. All three men have stuck at this subject for years, (you can see them all in last year’s Panorama, giving their thoughts on the wider scandal).
Just by the by
In the course of constructing tonight’s secret email I’ve been reading through some more of the evidence to last year’s Justice select committee, and noted that Tom Hedges, a former Subpostmaster who was prosecuted by the Post Office, wrote to tell MPs:
“I believe, had my case been passed to the police to investigate and therefore the CPS to prosecute, neither body would have found enough evidence to take my case to trial… During the whole process, I always denied theft and blamed Horizon for these apparent losses. The answer was always the same, “Horizon is robust and you are the only person who has reported problems. Your contract requires you to make good losses and we want our money”. At no time would anyone consider any other cause for the “missing money”.“
It’s pure Kafka. And it seems that despite the best efforts of many committed individuals, the state is doing what it can to exonerate itself from enabling it.
Until tomorrow…
Just before I go, hello to everyone who is new here, please settle down and make yourself at home. Thank you very much for your donations and all the information you keep pinging back to me. I do try to respond to every email. Even if I can’t reply, I promise I do read every single one. Without doing so I wouldn’t be in possession of half the knowledge and information I have now – so thank you, I am grateful.
If I get a chance there will be a report tomorrow on Mr Jones’ Westminster Hall activities and the government’s response.
Anon.
N