Not particularly engaged

Hello secret emailers

I am so frustrated Kim and I didn’t manage to get a report to you yesterday. Court days tend to be 13 hour days for me, and trying to train someone up to use all the emailing, blogging and tweeting platforms was stressful. We made one slip whilst I wasn’t concentrating we and lost our evening’s work.

Of course you can piece together how yesterday in court went by reading the morning and afternoon’s tweets. Each link will take you to a really simple, easy to read page on a website called Thread Reader, which recompiles threaded tweets in a very elegant way. Each page only takes around 10 – 12 minutes to read – so that’s the short version of what happened yesterday.

The long version is of course the transcript. There is some shocking stuff in there, particularly from Horizon’s Chief Architect at Fujitsu. There are a couple of exchanges in there which will make your eyes revolve. Here’s just a taster on why Horizon doesn’t have a dispute button:

A. That was a Post Office decision.


Q. Can you remember what the pros and cons that they had in
 mind were when they made the decision?


A. I think the basic argument was that disputes — we
 wanted the flow of data through the system as quickly as
 possible because that keeps our books tidy.

There you have it – the Post Office doesn’t want anything like grubby little Subpostmasters messing up their books with disputes over money, so it magics the possibility away.

Mr Godeseth was remarkably bad at either being in the room or taking responsibility for much, despite a 28 year career working in IT for the Post Office and/or Horizon and being the Chief Architect. The judge was interested in just who had decided there would be no dispute button on Horizon:

MR JUSTICE FRASER: Were you involved in the discussion
 about that, or were you just told there wasn’t going to
 be a dispute button?


A. I would say that I was aware. I wasn’t particularly
 engaged in the conversation.

There’s so much more. Mr Godeseth had to be asked to provide three witness statements before he even got to the witness box and I am quite sure his performance has done the Post Office no favours at all. In fact, given what the judge said about the last bunch of senior Post Office witnesses, I suspect I know what’s coming.

Mr Godeseth continues to give evidence this morning.

Hobby pony

I had a lot of very gracious responses to my little rant about media coverage yesterday, which just goes to show what a classy readership this secret email has. Someone approached me in court yesterday and explained to me that so many claimants are both traumatised by their experience at the hands of the Post Office, and still having to work long past retirement age with all their life savings taken from them. Mobilising people to come down to London and face a stressful, expensive day costs significant sums and requires a huge amount of effort, especially to older people who might also have health problems too.

That person was absolutely right. It’s all very well for me to make statements in the way I have, but I live close to London, I work there every day, I’m relatively young and energetic and used to these kinds of environments. And I’ve never had an arm of the state kill my reputation, take my job and walk off with my life savings.

I apologise if I upset anyone. It’s not my intention and I will endeavour to show more understanding next time I saddle up.

Have a fab day whatever you’re doing.

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.