Horizon trial day 3 preview

Hey hey secret emailers

Despite my runny nose I woke up in a good mood this morning. There’s lots of work to be done, but we’re heading towards the end of the week and a first trial judgment, unless the Post Office manage to stick a spanner in the works, which they still could do.

We’ll know today as the judge gave them until 5pm yesterday to feed back on his 180,000 word opus, which is due to be handed down at (high) noon tomorrow. The man has a sense of drama.

In fact – as I mentioned in a tweet yesterday – he went full-on Simon Cowell during the afternoon session when the claimants’ QC Patrick Green notified the court he had just been given some info by the Post Office and wanted five minutes to discuss it with Richard Roll before Mr Roll took the stand.

There was some to-ing and fro-ing before the judge said:

“I’m not going to give you five minutes, [beat] I will actually give you ten minutes.”

The crowd went wild.

They didn’t really. Like me, the judge clearly woke up with a stinking cold yesterday morning as he was sneezing his way through proceedings. I suspect, being a super-fit triathlete and former Royal Marine he will be fully recovered today. I am relying on drugs to get me through.

A response!

I have said many times that I enjoy reading your correspondence, and I really do. The door is always open for you to write something for postofficetrial.com – whether you have a personal experience you want to share (I met a lovely couple of secret emailers yesterday outside court yesterday and I hope they will send in their extraordinary tale).

Even if I can’t respond in a meaningful way, I read everything you send me.

Big Tim

If you haven’t read Tim McCormack’s blog – it’s well worth having a look. If you, like Tim, have Problems With POL, you might have some common ground. Tim has become very good at pulling out Post Office’s own evidence and highlighting it for what it is. His latest post is here.

Bakerman

Last night I received an email from Mark Baker from the CWU. He knows one of yesterday’s witnesses, Angela Burke and he wanted to put on record his thoughts about her evidence. I have posted up his email on Post Office Trial here (with permission of course!). It really is that easy to join the debate.

I am particularly keen to hear from claimants or non-claimant existing/former Subpostmasters, Post Office employees or assistants. Tell me in your own words what happened to you or what you know. If you’re not sure how to start, I’ve got a crib sheet which suggests basic facts you should start with (eg where you worked, how long for, what you did before etc) and other useful tips.

Just get in touch by hitting reply to this email. And if you are on the inside of the Post Office – goodness me you must have some stories. If you want anonymity, you can have it.

Photos

Your photos of Post Office logos are amazing. Thanks so much for sending them in. I am not naming the people who have done so as I think discretion might be preferable, but I have had some real belters over the last 24 hours, including a Horizon boot up screen. I am saving it up for an appropriate moment, maybe tomorrow when/if the judgment comes down.

If you can take any pictures of any Horizon hardware or software without identifying the branch, please do send me those too. Screen images, shiny new stuff or tired-looking keyboards or monitors would be great… any Horizon branding would be useful too. Thanks.

Information flow

I recognise what I have to say about this litigation is the least important thing about it. That is why I am aiming to prioritise getting the source documents out to you as soon as I can. I finish tweeting at 4.30 and yesterday was lucky enough to catch the 5.02pm home. Having fixed the outside bin shelter for Mrs Wallis I then went upstairs and got on with uploading and formatting the transcripts and witness statements to the website, tweeting links to the important stuff as it is published. Then, at 9.15pm I sent round last night’s email with all the links therein.

This method has its drawbacks. It means if all you want is the round-up of what happened, you are having to wait five hours to get it. It was much the same with the last trial. It also means that if you are reliant on this email as the only source of trial information, you don’t get anything at all until I send out the links.

However, there are workarounds and the best one is first:

1) If you put your email address into the “Never miss a post – subscribe by email” box on the postofficetrial.com, website you will get each post as it goes up on the website automatically.

2) If you follow me on twitter I will tweet when each post (including transcripts and witness statements) go live on the blog.

3) If you just occasionally check the website by clicking here, you will see that new stuff has gone up with your very own eyes.

I you enjoy my write-ups and wish they could appear sooner I can only apologise – I have to read and co-ordinate a hella lot of documentation before I even know what I want to write, and I want to get it right, because I don’t want to get sued.

Fire up the postgrads

As you may know I am going to be away w/c 8 April, which will now be three or four days of Patrick Green, QC for the claimants, cross-examining Dr Worden, the Post Office’s independent IT expert. I hope, however, to subcontract all tweeting and blogging and secret-emailing activity to a postgrad journalism student, who will spend the day in court doing what I have been doing for the last two trials.

I will train them as best I can (many candidates are now already subscribed to this secret email) and I will introduce you to them or let them introduce themselves with a picture and a biog once the right candidate has been selected. I will also give them all my twitter, mailer and blog logins, so nothing will change at your end.

And of course the joy of the internet means I can add my own stuff or deal with any issues remotely, liaising with my new colleague on the ground.

I hope you think this is a sensible use of your money, as it means you will continue to get tweets, secret emails, and document uploads during an important part of the trial. And you will be helping a bright young journalist of the future earn a bit of cash and get a bit of court reporting/blogging experience.

Right – I’m off to add all yesterday’s links to the Horizon trial menu and grab a coffee before fighting my way into town. In the rain.

Live tweeting from court starts here at 10.30am!

Have a good day.

Nick

Please feel free to forward this email. The more people who read it, the more people find out about what is the biggest trial going through the UK courts right now.