Hi there

I hope you had a good weekend. There was a lot of news and sport going on, for sure.

Today at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, the briefing note given to Ed Davey ahead of his meeting with Alan Bates was given another going over, so I sought to enquire if it had been published before.

Though it was freely quoted from during Sir Alan’s evidence session on 9 April this year, it hadn’t been put up on the Inquiry website, so I asked if that could happen. The Inquiry press office kindly obliged.

As it was more interesting than the evidence of Sir Stephen Lovegrove (another former ShEx CEO), I focused today’s blog post on the briefing note. You can read it here.

If you want some Lovegrove action, you can read my live-tweets here.

I will add that I have found the last week some of the most painful evidence I have ever witnessed. You watch these well-paid financiers/civil servants troop in and out of the witness box and you can see exactly how and why things went so disastrously wrong.

Each organisation de-risks itself through its reassuring processes and presents those reassurances upwards to supposedly demonstrate it is doing its job.

I am beginning to see why some call the civil service “the Blob”, especially given its proactive licence to keep useful or interesting information from the minister in charge.

Tom Cooper was the best of a bad bunch, but Richard Callard on Friday was just the worst – far too happy to swallow the Post Office’s line on Horizon and feed it without modification or challenge to the minister whilst supposedly maintaining independence from what he was being told. Callard had a kindred spirit in Mike Whitehead, the ShEx colleague who briefed Davey.

Tech Talk

I have discovered, by degrees, that the real-ish time transcription app I use to record what’s happening at the inquiry via the youtube feed dumps its transcript into a .txt document which can be opened whilst it is updating.

This meant I was able to record, transcribe and then cut and paste into twitter Sir Wyn Williams’ announcement about Phase 7 of the inquiry more of less verbatim (see the live tweets here). The inquiry then released the official transcript of what Sir Wyn said here. If I had more time I’d see how the two compare.

It did get me thinking – it might be worthwhile attempting to deliver more direct quotes tomorrow by cutting, pasting, sense-checking and attributing the real-time AI transcript before posting it to twitter. It would be on a bit of a time lag, but it looks like it’s not a massive one. I might try it for Fujitsu Andy tomorrow.

Deceitful Dunks

Mr Dunks – Fujitsu’s “cryptographic key manager” – who either analysed or summarised (he couldn’t quite say which) ARQ data used in the prosecution of Subpostmasters makes his second visit to the Inquiry tomorrow.

Dunks failed to cover himself in glory first time round. This is the same Andy Dunks who also attempted to mislead Mr Justice Fraser at the High Court. It could get messy.

Tech Talk 2

Another altogether better Andrew, Wizard of the Post Office Scandal Website and general Dark Arts guru, has again tweaked the front page of POS to make it look more newsy still.

Do take a look if you have a moment. All comments very welcome. I will put the most complimentary in the secret email risk register, assign them a pretty colour, smooth the language out and present each point in emollient terms to Andrew so he knows everything looks great.

I’m finally learning how arm’s length businesses work.

Subpostmasters Social

Thanks to all the former Subpostmasters who are making the journey to Central London on Friday for the Subpostmasters Social and thanks to those legal firms and other organisations/individuals who have kindly put some money behind the bar.

If you are a former Subpostmaster affected by this scandal and you’ve been thinking of coming (and bringing your partner) along on Friday all the details are here – we have a very very small number of places left before the room hits capacity, so please get your name down quick. The Horizon Scandal Fund, which is hosting this event, can also potentially pay for your travel and accommodation costs but if you need that sorting out before Friday, now is the time to get in touch.

If there are any law firms/barrister sets acting for any of the Core Participants at the Inquiry who would also like to help pay for the drinks on Friday, do get in touch. I can point you in the right direction.

Right… Dunks’ latest crack at trying to get his story straight begins at 0945 tomorrow. I’ll be in the hearing room to witness it and provide you with a take on it before too long.

Best

Nick