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Morning secret emailers!
As you hopefully know, the trial only sat for one day this week. I had planned to spend the downtime writing, uploading, indexing and formatting the various documents I have received over the last three weeks, but then I got asked to do a special project for ITV News, which they said I could fit in around the remaining four trial days (Mon – Thu next week). This will allow me to hold back some of the kickstarter/paypal money which you have all so very kindly donated for the next trial, but it means the writing, uploading I planned to do is being done in my own time, and for that reason is very slow, for which I apologise.
There are a few things to tell you:
1) There is a piece on the Post Office and the NFSP leading this week’s Private Eye In the Back section on page 37.
Most of it won’t be new to you, secret emailers, but Private Eye has a much bigger readership than the postofficetrial.com website, and it’s great they’ve been following everything so closely. Please support the journalism by buying the magazine. It’s issue 1484 (dated 30 November) and the cover is posted below.
The other bit of print journalism which I have been told is in the pipeline is an article for the Daily Mail, which was originally scheduled for Saturday and then Monday. It has, to the best of my knowledge, not yet appeared. It could be that it goes in the paper this coming Saturday, but I’m hoping that Antonia, who wrote the piece and who has spoken to a number of claimants, will be able to let me know as soon as she knows.
Here’s the Private Eye cover. Go buy it if you can afford the £2 cover price:
2) The last (three) secret emails have been plagued by broken links to a document listing the Common Issues in this Common Issues trial. The reason for the problem is that the platform I use for this email was adding loads of code to the link in order to track its usage, however the site the link was pointing to (bailli.org) wasn’t capable of stripping that code off and taking you to where you wanted to go. Apologies for the inconvenience. There are now lots of ways of reading the Common Issues, all posted here on the Post Office trial website.
One thing that is not my fault is how almost unreadable this document is. Even the judge thinks so. On Monday in court he asked the parties in the trial to give him a clean list of the common issues without any specific pleadings attached. He told the court “I’ve got pleading references coming out of my ears.”
If I get hold of that document I’ll post it up in the usual manner.
3) The last three Post Office witness statements are up on postofficetrial.com
The are:
all are best read in the context of my Day 11 write-up.
4) On Tuesday I posted up two blog posts. The first is only really of interest to journalists and lawyers, in which I submitted an application to make an audio recording to the court and ended up standing before the judge for a few minutes on Monday morning. The other is a very affecting email I received from a former Subpostmaster, which I would urge you to read.
Okay that’s me for now. I’m off to wake the kids up and then schlep in the rain to ITN towers in that London. I doubt I’ll have time to write another email or post any more documents before the trial re-starts next week, but I’ll do what I can.
Have a good day.