On the front Foat

Good morning!

If I’ve got this right today will see the second appearance of Ben Foat at the Inquiry with the publication of his fifth witness statement. He first gave evidence on 4 July last year and was due to make another appearance on 5 September, but was stood down by the Inquiry Chair, Sir Wyn Williams.

Ben Foat is the Post Office’s current general counsel. After joining the Post Office as its Head of Legal (financial services) in 2015, Foat got the GC job in May 2019 the middle of the High Court group litigation Bates v Post Office, after the abrupt departure of Jane McLeod, a fellow antipodean. Interestingly, Jane McLeod, who is currently refusing to co-operate with the Inquiry, followed her predecessor Chris Aujard to FNZ, a New Zealand-based wealth management company, which suggests Foat may find a life raft down under if he turns out to have made a similar series of catastrophic decisions in his current role.

Foat is an interesting character in that no one really seems to know what he has achieved in his role over the last five years. We do know he won In-house Solicitor of the Year at the Law Society Excellence Awards in January 2019, despite the fact he was advising the Post Office on a litigation strategy which would eventually, effectively bankrupt it.

What we know from Foat’s interview with the Law Society at the time, is that he is all about colleagues bringing their “true selves” to work and making the Post Office a “safe space” for them to do so. This sort of guff plays better when you’re not actively trying to hide the truth about your company’s abhorrent and deeply unsafe behaviour towards hundreds of innocent people.

Foat was previously hauled up before the Inquiry to explain the Post Office’s disclosure failings. He seemed remarkably out of his depth. Let’s see what he has to say today. I’ll be there at midday, live-tweeting here, and putting up a blog post on the website after.

Don’t forget to sign up to the free email alerts on the Post Office Scandal website. That way you’ll get the blog posts within an hour or so of them being published.

More things

A huge number of articles have been published over the last week. The most newsworthy is perhaps a report in The Guardian stating that the police are aiming to deploy up to 80 detectives for their criminal investigation into a group of, as yet, unnamed individuals from Fujitsu and the Post Office. I dread to think how much public money the police have already wasted since Operation Olympos (later changed to Olympus) began in January 2024. Let’s see if this latest bid for funding will lead to anything more substantial than interviewing two people under caution twice (the sum acknowledged output of their investigations so far).

Here’s the best of the rest:

1) In the light of Paula Vennells’ inability to explain during her evidence to the Inquiry what constitutes a systemic error (despite her company misappropriating the term in a shameful manner from 2013 onwards), James Christie explains what it can and can’t mean in the (web) pages of Computer Weekly.

2) There’s a note by Lord Arbuthnot on LinkedIn about a summary of the House of Lords debate over the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Bill, which has subsequently become law. The summary highlights the apparent confusion in the House during the debate over the Subpostmasters whose convictions were upheld by the Court of Appeal and the government’s refusal to take on the Court of Appeal over the matter. Click on the link above to read the summary, reposted by Lord Arbuthnot with the comment “we’ve won the huge battle of the Bill itself, and we are slowly, painstakingly, winning the war”.

If you’re not on LinkedIn, you can go direct to the transcript of the debate itself here in Hansard.

3) Toby Jones’ comments about Alan Bates and the campaigning Subpostmasters at the Hay Festival was written up by various outlets. Here is a selection:

Alan Bates ‘can’t be bought’, says Toby Jones after he turned down Glastonbury – Telegraph

I played a hero in Post Office drama, says Toby Jones – BBC

Toby Jones praises ‘extraordinary dignity’ of Post Office accused – Guardian

4) The Times’ Camilla Long pulls apart Vennells’ Inquiry weep fest with her piece I saw Paula Vennells ugly-cry over and over. Pity it was for herself. In the same paper, Dominic O’Connell asks Could you pass the Paula Vennells test?, wondering if what we do in our daily lives at work would pass moral and ethical scrutiny.

5) The Daily Mirror tracks down former Post Office exec Mike Young, blamed by Paula Vennells for misleading her, and said to be untraceable by the Inquiry. From what he is quoted as saying in the article it sounds like he’d be absolutely delighted to give evidence.

6) Finally, a great scoop by the website Bleeding Cool, which I only came across thanks to the Popbitch email. Bleeding Cool saw that the Sock Puppet Theatre’s take on the Post Office Scandal had been pulled from the Bedford Comedy Festival “Bedfringe” at the insistence of its sponsor. Who is the sponsor of the Bedford Comedy Festival (and owner of the venue in which the comedy skit was due to be performed)? Bedford School. Who used to be a governor of Bedford School? Paula Vennells! Bleeding Cool’s take was followed up by The Daily Telegraph, after interviewing the creator of Post Office Scandal: The Musical, Kev F Sutherland, who has every right to be furious at being censored. As the Popbitch email says: “Paula Vennells finally catches a break”. What a farce.

I am grateful as ever to Paul McGuire, Chris Head, Google Alerts and my own sad internet addiction for bringing the above to my attention.

Thanks

I’d better start getting ready to head up to that London or I’m going to be late for Mr Foat. Thanks to everyone who signed up to this newsletter whilst I was being very quiet last week. It’s now full speed ahead to the end of July. Do please keep your comments and info coming, and apologies once more if I don’t respond to a specific request or point. I do read and appreciate everything I get.

Best

Nick