Cometh the hearing…

Hello

I hope you’re keeping well. I wanted to be at the Inquiry this morning, sadly I had to go to the fracture clinic at Saint Peter’s Hospital in Chertsey.

Nonetheless I listened to Alan Bates’ evidence on the bus home and then watched along in the afternoon with thousands of others using the public inquiry’s live youtube feed.

I wrote up as much as I could on postofficescandal.uk website, here.

The transcript of Alan Bates’ evidence, his witness statement and documents other journalists may have requested, don’t appear to have been collated yet, that you can find the link to it when it goes live from this page.

More work-shy nonsense

I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this on a daily basis. Piecing together quotes from the Inquiry, and inserting them into a news report is difficult enough when I’m at home. It’s going to be impossible in the Inquiry room as I can neither type, nor write very quickly, nor dictate my report during proceedings for what I hope for obvious reasons.

I have also been told that I need to have a plate and screws inserted in my wrist, and I am currently waiting on an operation date, which needs to be sooner than later, or my bones are going to start knitting together in an awkward position.

The consultant I spoke to was somewhat perturbed when I told him I was going on an 11-date tour starting Friday.

Oh well, as I said on BBC Five Live this morning, it’s my own stupid fault.

Henceforth I am going to try and muddle through, watching, listening to and absorbing the information coming out of the Inquiry, but I suspect there won’t be too many blog posts between now and my arm recovering.

However I will attempt to send you some newsletters, either from the Inquiry ante-room, one of the venues on my tour, or an operating theatre recovery ward.

I will use the newsletters to link to other peoples’ pieces, and hopefully bring you some interesting Post Office-related reportage. I’m afraid, at the moment, it’s the best I can do.

Thanks

Thank you very much to everyone who kindly got in touch after my last newsletter. Even the abuse was friendly. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to reply to everybody.

If you’ve only just joined the secret emailers, and you’re thinking “this is not what I signed up for”, do please reply to this email and I will process you a refund immediately.

Yours,

Nick

Post Office Scandal – The Inside Story

In April and May 2024, I’ll be visiting various theatres in towns around England in the counties of Cheshire, Shropshire, County Durham, Dorset, East Sussex, Devon, Cornwall, Essex, Oxfordshire, Worcestershire, Hertfordshire, and Surrey, including my home town of Walton on Thames.

At each venue I’ll be joined by a former Subpostmaster (apart from Walton when Second Sight’s Ian Henderson will be in the chair). There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions and learn even more about the scandal.

All the dates and box office links are here. Please do have a look, see if there’s a venue near you, and if you fancy it, book a couple of tickets. Please also feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends who may live near a venue!

I’ll be around after each show in the foyer or bar and look forward to saying hello if you can make it.