Alan Bates day in court

Hello friends.

Quite an odd one today – it should have been more exciting than it was, but there was no sense of occasion. Finally, the man who has campaigned against the Post Office and gathered so many similarly disaffected people around him, worked for years for very little recompense and then raised the money to take his opponents to court, finally got to face their representative, in front of a judge.

The exchanges weren’t mundane – they got quite heated at one point, but this ain’t Hollywood. It’s the grinding business of English civil law, and the strange codified way in which it operates.

The number of journalists in the room has dwindled and will dwindle still further next week. Sam Greenhill from the Daily Mail has done great work trying to push this story

You can read this week’s pieces here:

Monday: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6352691/Post-Office-legal-battle-former-branch-managers-claim-wrongly-accused-theft.html

Wednesday: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6364901/More-500-village-Post-Office-staff-sue-company-accused-stealing-missing-money.html

Today: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6364901/More-500-village-Post-Office-staff-sue-company-accused-stealing-missing-money.html

and my thanks to Stu G – a blog reader who alerted me to the Financial Times piece you can read here:

https://on.ft.com/2JOlGeS

I finally got the opening submissions from the claimants and the defence uploaded. You are the first people to be given these links – it’s a secret email exclusive!

Claimants: https://www.scribd.com/document/392695442/Bates-and-others-v-Post-Office-Claimants-Opening-Submissions-Common-Issues-Trial

Defendants:

I have uploaded them to Scribd which doesn’t render that well on mobiles – from memory they want you to download the app or something – so I might do what I did with the Second Sight report and put it on GoogleDocs too. Please do check the links work and let me know if they don’t.

After reading your feedback and having a think, I have decided not to email out the daily unroll of my tweets, but just post them up on the blog and share the link so you can read my real-time account of what happened this morning here: https://www.postofficetrial.com/2018/11/day-2-morning-session-tweets.html

and the afternoon session here: https://www.postofficetrial.com/2018/11/day-2-afternoon-session-tweets.htmlhttps://www.postofficetrial.com/2018/11/day-2-afternoon-session-tweets.html

If you want to catch them in real time, follow me on twitter here: @nickwallis.

I remain grateful to you for spreading the word about this blog, plus all the great feedback, ideas and advice. There have been a number of people who have emailed just to say hello which is great! I’m sorry if I don’t have the opportunity to respond to every email or tweet.

And thank you to all the new backers who have joined in the last week. The donations continue to come in, and it’s a wonderful feeling every time I see a new name and email address pop up in my inbox.

There is no court session tomorrow, so there won’t be a court report, but there might be another secret email….!