Good morning

I am afraid I have not had the opportunity to put up a piece on Richard Callard, nor have I had time to watch the evidence of Patrick O’Sullivan, the second witness on Wednesday.

I was at Callard yesterday in a largely deserted hearing room, though both Richard Brooks from Private Eye and Panorama veteran, Andy Verity were in attendance. Andy shared a line he is following with Richard and I about an element of this scandal which has come out of the evidence to the Inquiry. We knocked it about a bit. He’s onto something, or, possibly, nothing. That’s the annoying thing about investigative journalism.

Shaikh it up

I’ll tell you who else might be onto something – Eleanor Shaikh, who was also watching proceedings in the hearing room yesterday.

Eleanor spotted a conflict of evidence between Richard Callard’s assertions about the Swift report, ordered by the minister, Baroness Neville Rolfe in 2015 and commissioned by the then Post Office chairman, Tim Parker.

Jonathan Swift QC produced his final report in February 2016 but was advised by the Post Office General Counsel Jane MacLeod that because it was legally privileged he should not show it to the Post Office board, on which Callard sat.

Yesterday Callard claimed on oath he wasn’t even aware of the report’s existence. Yet Shaikh has seen contemporaneous documentary evidence which seems to suggest Callard would have not only been told about the Swift report, but been briefed on its contents.

You can read Eleanor’s short, evidenced tweet thread here. Again I have not had time to check everything out for myself, but this is what Callard said yesterday about the Swift report and how its contents were or weren’t communicated to the board via the Post Office Chairman Tim Parker:

“With Swift it sounds a bit… daft, but I never really, I didn’t really think at the time that there was a Swift report. What I was interested in was the Parker review… and Swift contributed to that but as I understood it Tim Parker was also talking to Second Sight, he talked to Lord Arbuthnot, he was talking internally and so what we wanted was his view, not the QC’s view of it… I wasn’t informed that the Swift report even existed.”

We know that Parker was admonished by the government in 2020 for not sharing the Swift report with the Post Office board, which, confusingly, when it was delivered by Swift in 2016, was known as the Chairman’s Review.

Dripping poison

It’s all part of a piece which typifies the Post Office’s and, it seems, the civil service’s approach to this scandal. Cling on to the most favourable parts of any investigation (eg Second Sight’s “We have so far found no evidence of system wide (systemic) problems with the Horizon software”) and ignore the massive red flags.

When the red flags become too big to ignore (Second Sight’s subsequent reports, the Detica report, the Swift report), bury or hide the conclusions.

We have seen with both Baroness Neville-Rolfe and some of the evidence which came out about Jo Swinson yesterday, the most switched-on ministers clearly smelled rats.

It seems Callard thought it was his job to drip poison in their ears on behalf of the Post Office, telling ministers to focus on other things, or that there was no evidence to support the Postmasters’ claims.

Callard’s successor, Tom Cooper, had significant concerns about the Post Office’s approach to the Horizon scandal. Sadly he did very little about it. Callard had no such qualms. He willingly swallowed the Post Office’s nonsense, either ignored or didn’t see evidence which pointed in the opposite direction, and considered it his job not to keep the minister fully appraised of what was going on.

It won’t surprise you to know Callard was a master of producing heat map risk registers, none of which seemed to get a handle on the biggest risk facing the Post Office. But they did look very pretty.

You can read my tweet thread covering the whole day here.

Read out

I did manage to get one blog post out over the last couple of days, revealing to the wider world that Nick Read has handed over CEO duties to his deputy and looks like he’s on his way out of the Post Office. This was followed up yesterday by various outlets, including Sky News and the BBC. The information first came to me via a secret emailer, for which I am very grateful.

Please do feel free to forward any information you get from useful sources regarding this scandal. It’s always good to know what’s going on, especially if it makes a story. I will never reveal a source. If you’re worried about tracking software, take a good photo of the information you have and then send me that on an email. We can take it from there.

Thanks to all the secret emailers who have joined over the last week. It’s great to have you on board. I’m going to try to get something up on Callard tomorrow, before attending a full week of hearings from the Inquiry, including the return of Fujitsu Andy, Ed Davey and on Friday, Jo Swinson herself.

Have a good weekend.

Nick