Sir Wyn Williams adjourns until tomorrow

I had driven to the station, parked up, bought my ticket and was idly checking my emails when I saw the inquiry hearing was not going to happen today.

Given my 13yo son was going to be home alone on an inset day, this isn’t necessarily the worst news, chez Wallis. Here is an AI-generated facsimile (tidied up by me) of what the Chair of the Inquiry, Sir Wyn Williams said when he briefly appeared on the live video stream at midday:

“Good afternoon, everyone. Today we were due to hear evidence from Mr Ben Foat, the group general counsel of the Post Office Ltd.

Unfortunately that cannot take place because the member of the Inquiry counsel team who was due to question Mr Foat is unwell. I was informed of this earlier this morning and Mr Beer KC and I took the view that counsel was not fit to conduct a lengthy questioning session and that it was not practicable for another member of the counsel team to take over at very short notice.

Unfortunately, therefore, to repeat, today’s evidence session cannot take place. Arrangements will be made in due course for receiving Mr Foat’s evidence and all core participants and members of the public will be given notice of the relevant arrangements as soon as that can be done practically.

So, thank you very much. We will adjourn now and resume again at 9.45 tomorrow morning with the evidence of Mr. Day.”

The barrister scheduled to question Foat today was I think, Emma Price (pictured below in full flow last month). I hope she recovers soon.

Since sending you this morning’s newsletter

I have been reminded of/alerted to the fact…

1) that Richard Moorhead has delivered a lengthy speech about the Post Office scandal at the University of Strathclyde, which you can read on his substack here. He has also commented on his other blog about a completely unrelated tribunal case brought against the NHS during which the lawyers for the NHS sought to mislead the court and then tried to recuse the judge when they didn’t like the way things are going. Sound familiar?

Here’s the BBC’s write up, and here is one from Westminster Confidential naming the legal people responsible.

2) Carroll Barry-Walsh (an investigator and lawyer) has written three blog posts on the Barry-Walsh website about the Post Office Scandal. They are not currently linked to each other, but you can read all three in reverse order on the Barry-Walsh news page.

3) There are two good pieces by Computer Weekly on the Post Office’s inability to kill Horizon and the fact there is going to be a government investigation into the Post Office’s prosecutions made using evidential data from Post Office’s own pre-Horizon system, Capture.

On that point, I am pleased to be able to tell you that despite standing down as a member of parliament, Kevan Jones (who has pulled together a lot of information on the Capture system) will continue to serve on the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board. This is important as Jones’ office has a huge corporate (? campaigning?) memory of the ins and outs of this scandal and it would be a desperate shame if it were lost.

Enough, already

Okay two newsletters in one day is quite enough! I will not be sending you a preview of Chris Day’s evidence tomorrow, but I will write it up for the website and re-start the emails on Wednesday.

Thanks to Chris Head and Tom Hedges for contacting me directly to warn me today’s hearing had been stood down! I got a refund on my train ticket, so all is well.

Bye then

Nick