Clark and Cable: Responsible for everything, accountable for nothing

Greg “Just Like That” Clark

Two Secretaries of State, whose tenure in office covered significant periods of the Post Office scandal gave evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today. They are the most senior ranked and last politicians to give evidence in this phase, and some of what they had to say was illuminating, but not much.

Vince Cable was business secretary during the coalition government from 2010 to 2015. Greg Clark held the same post for the duration of Theresa May’s government, from 2016 to 2019. Clark made it clear he had no love for the Post Office given the way they had treated one of his constituents. In 2010, former Subpostmaster Pauline Thomson pleaded guilty to false accounting in a deal with the Post Office prosecutors who had initially accused her of the theft of £34,000 from her Post Office.

Shortly afterwards, Thomson joined the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance and in 2013 joined the Post Office’s complaint and mediation scheme. In February 2015 Thomson was told she had been recommended by Second Sight and the scheme’s Working Group for mediation. Two days later she received a letter from the Post Office telling her they had declined to mediate with her.

Clark wrote to Post Office CEO Paula Vennells pointing out the disappointment Thomson felt and the inconsistency in the Post Office’s communications. He asked for an explanation as to why the Post Office had decided not to mediate. Clark told the Inquiry he received an “impudent” response from Vennells’ apparatchik Angela van den Bogerd telling him there was no inconsistency at all. Van den Bogerd wrote:

“The final decision on whether or not to mediate a case ultimately rests with the parties involved. It follows that either party can decline to take part. Mrs Thomson’s case has been thoroughly reinvestigated through the scheme and after careful consideration of all relevant facts including Second Sight’s final report, the Post Office has concluded that mediation does not offer any realistic prospect of resolving your constituent’s complaint for the reasons set out in the letter to her.”

Clark was not impressed with the van den Bogerd’s failure to “answer the question as to why Mrs Thomson was being refused the ability to arbitrate” and noted she couldn’t even be bothered to get her name right, calling her Paula, rather than Pauline, in the letter.

Clark said the experience of dealing with Vennells and van den Bogerd over Thomson’s case “conditioned my view of the management of Post Office Limited”.

Litigation

On his first day as business secretary, Clark was told the Criminal Cases Review Commission were looking at a number of Subpostmaster cases and civil litigation was looming. Clark told the Inquiry: “My view was to welcome the fact that the court was going to look at this, the High Court in particular. I thought the authority of a High Court judge, the requirements of disclosure and all the rest of the things, was a better way of resolving this than a process that involves the Post Office.

Thereafter, Clark effectively took a back seat on matters relating to the Subpostmasters’ campaign, but he was keen to see the outcome. When the Common Issues judgment was handed down in March 2019 Clark told the Inquiry he thought it was “seminal”. Julian Blake, asking questions for the Inquiry asked him why. Clark replied “because the judge was very clear that the postmasters and mistresses were right, and that the Post Office had behaved despicably… and to the considerable detriment of the claimants“.

Julian Blake

On hearing that the Post Office’s first response was to talk about appealing the judgment for “tactical” reasons, Clark says he was “incensed” by the use of this word:

“It seemed to me that this was a very important judgment that was strongly critical of the Post Office and supportive of the Subpostmasters, and it was instantly evident that that needed to be accepted and acted upon.”

Clark says he convened a meeting with his own civil servants, ordering a change of approach in both “substance and tone” in the Post Office’s approach to litigation. He also ordered the drawing up of options – including what he called the “nuclear” option of removing the board. Most importantly, he said he wanted the Post Office to start looking at proper “restitution”.

Unfortunately the Post Office was not in listening mode, and whilst Clark’s civil servants were trying (or not) to find a way to turn his words into action, the Post Office was heading towards a disastrous recusal attempt and appeal.

Cable’s Claims

Sir Vince Cable

Vince Cable claims he wasn’t even aware of Subpostmasters concerns about the Horizon IT system for the majority of his tenure as Business Secretary – repeatedly telling the Inquiry it was never brought to his attention. Or never properly brought to his attention. Letters sent to him by MPs and members of the public were either answered by his private office or diverted to the Postal Affairs ministers – Ed Davey, Jo Swinson and Normal Lamb.

When he did make enquiries, the National Federation of Subpostmasters (an organisation Cable said he trusted due to a previous interaction with them whilst he was a backbencher), assured his officials there was nothing wrong with the system.

Cable seemed entirely unaware of the Second Sight report, the growing parliamentary campaign and the Post Office’s complaint and mediation scheme, launched on his watch. He told Jason Beer KC, who asked him questions on behalf of the Inquiry, that whilst some documents did come his way, he received reassurances from his civil servants which he took on trust. Besides: “the way Parliament worked was that I walked past Mr Arbuthnot and the other MPs several times a day, and if they were concerned, they would surely have stopped and said something to me. I mean, they did on other issues…

Beer wanted to know what Cable meant.

JB: Sorry, Sir Vince, are you saying there that James Arbuthnot was not concerned because he didn’t raise the matter with you?
VC: No, I’m sure…he was. I’ve read about his work and it was monumental. He did an enormous amount of good work. For whatever reason, the MPs who were concerned about this issue never raised it with me in Parliament. They had abundant opportunities to do so.
JB: You’re not being critical of them for failing?
VC: No, I’m not at all.
JB: You’re saying they simply took a different route?
VC: They took a different route, and different MPs operate in different ways. No, I’m not remotely critical… James Arbuthnot obviously did a heroic job. I wouldn’t dare to criticise him.

But he kind of was, and he returned to the same point later in his evidence.

VC: What is strange about this episode is that none of these 140 MPs ever came to talk to me about it. I had some of them coming to talk to me in the privacy of my House of Commons office about post office issues like the last bank in town where the post office were not being very proactive. Nobody came to talk to me… and for example the chairman of the select committee who I knew very well and respected he’s a very good parliamentarian had actually come to see me a few weeks before this episode and all he wanted to talk to me about was about the pub legislation and never raised the issue about the postmasters so I think I could be forgiven for not understanding the weight of this 140 MP campaign because none of them ever talked to me about it.
JB: He wrote you a detailed letter setting out his and the committee’s concerns.
VC: Yes but I think…
JB: Is that not enough?
VC: Certainly it wasn’t. No, I think all MPs realise that writing polite letters to departments isn’t necessarily the way to get through to people at the top of government. [You need] to [see] them face to face, and…
JB: So you do blame them for failing to come and see you.
VC: No, I’m not blaming them. I say different people had different styles. Some people operated through the formal processes of Parliament. Others didn’t. No, it’s not a question of blame. As I say, I had a great, having seen the mountain of work that they did, I have enormous respect for them. But it was… unfortunate that I never had any personal contact with the MPs about this matter.
JB: Would the outcome have been different? Is that what you’re saying Sir Vince?
VC: Yes, I think it probably would have been.
JB: In what way?
VC: Well, because I would have realised much earlier than March 2015 that there were serious problems were not being properly addressed by the post office and the department and I would have started to interrogate it much more aggressively as I did on quite a lot of other issues where MPs came to see me.

I asked James (now Lord) Arbuthnot about this and he said:

“I’d never heard Vince Cable speak or express any view about the Post Office. While I could have spoken to him, instead of doing that I’d held the Adjournment Debate on 17th December 2014, in which I and many other MPs had expressed their strong feelings to Jo Swinson, the Minister in direct charge of the Post Office. She entirely took the Post Office line. My own ministerial experience was that such a debate would have been well on the radar of the departmental Secretary of State, and it’s surprising that it apparently wasn’t.

I also took the matter to the chair of the Select Committee, Adrian Bailey, who immediately took it up and held his meeting. Again, such an evidence session should (according to my own ministerial experience) have been well on Cable’s radar.

I then raised the sacking of Second Sight with the Prime Minister in PM’s Questions, and he referred me to Vince Cable, to whom I wrote the same day. Cable wrote back, entirely taking the Post Office line. I was not to know that apparently he read neither my letter nor his own reply. I think it’s a bit rich of him to suggest he’d have taken a different line if I’d spoken to him. I simply don’t believe it.

He also raised the fact that it seems he held some sort of surgery for MPs on a Monday evening. That is a good thing, but useful only if MPs are aware of it (and yesterday was the first time I’d heard of it). But I go back to the first point, namely that I’d never heard him express any interest in the Post Office, which is rather confirmed by his evidence.”

Alan who?

By 2015 even Cable had clocked that there was a serious issue with the Post Office. The parliamentary noise was growing, and the Select Committee investigation took evidence from Alan Bates’ Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. Unfortunately Cable says he was caught up in an arms-to-Saudi Arabia “crisis” which kept him occupied until parliament was dissolved, telling the Inquiry:

“I was having to decide about the export of weapons to Saudi Arabia that would be in use to bomb civilians, and I was keeping awake at night, because either I’d have blood on my hands or I’d make a decision that would have put large numbers of British workers out of work, so I was totally preoccupied with that problem”

When asked what he would have done if he had clocked what a problem the Horizon scandal was becoming, Cable told Beer:

“I would have got all these people around the table, the [Business] select committee, Mr Arbuthnot, the Post Office people and for the first time Mr Bates – I’d not heard of him till this point – and I’d have got them round the table and ask what the hell’s going on.”

Cable lost his seat in the 2015 general election and did not seek, nor was not sought out by his successor, Sajid Javid, to discuss the Horizon IT scandal. When Cable was got re-elected in 2017, he did nothing whatsoever to address the scandal, telling Beer he “lost all contact with this issue after 2015”.

The evidence of Clark and Cable seems to suggest that serious problems with governance and accountability are baked into our political system, and it’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, the Inquiry recommends is done about it.

You can read the collated live tweets of Cable’s evidence here, with added document screenshots.


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31 responses to “Clark and Cable: Responsible for everything, accountable for nothing”

  1. Having followed this, off and on via Private Eye and now some of the ‘live’ hearings and questioning, quite coincidentally I came across this, by my old politics lecturer at University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Iain Mclean. who moved to Oxford back in the ’80s.

    Entitled ‘Lessons from the Aberfan disaster and its aftermath’ it’s the very pointed highlighting of the behaviour and character of the politicians (and not just the national ones), as well as the chairman of the NCB – a former (and still very clearly a) politician; the quality of the management in the NCB, and the senior civil servants – in the Charity Commission as well as the Ministry of Power.

    Listening to and watching the Horizon sessions, reading Second Sights reports, PE articles, etc., and you really have to wonder how much had and has changed.

    The lies, deceit, evasions, denials, cover-ups, and more …. can it just be the normal reaction and response of the establishment?

    Just a handful of excerpts from this excerpt:

    “The Rt Hon. Lord Robens of Woldingham, a former trade unionist and Labour politician whom the Macmillan government had appointed Chairman of the National Coal Board, arrived 36 hours later, having first gone to Guildford to be installed as Chancellor of Surrey University. He announced that the cause of the disaster was an unknown spring underneath the tip. This was immediately challenged by villagers who had known it all their lives.”

    “The NCB wasted up to 76 days of inquiry time by refusing to admit the liability that they had privately accepted before the inquiry started. The Tribunal called this ‘nothing short of audacious’. This may be the strongest language ever used in a Tribunal Report about a UK public body. A section of the report condemns the behaviour of Lord Robens in a fine piece of official prose:

    For the National Coal Board, through its counsel, thus to invite the Tribunal to ignore the evidence given by its Chairman was, at one and the same time, both remarkable and, in the circumstances, understandable. Nevertheless, the invitation is one which we think it right to accept.

    Of all tribunal reports known to me, only the 1996 Scott Report on arms to Iraq has used comparable language about senior public servants.”

    “There were only two good speeches: one by Leo Abse, the only non-miner to represent a seat in the Valleys, and one by the Conservatives’ brand-new Power spokesman, Margaret Thatcher. Abse called the exchange of letters between Robens and Marsh a ‘graceless pavane … a disgraceful spectacle’. Thatcher forensically pointed out that the Tribunal Report itself stated that one of the remaining Aberfan tips stood ‘at a very low factor of safety’. She asked why A. H. Kellett, the Chairman of the NCB in South Wales, had stayed at a conference in Japan when the disaster occurred. She also asked why on earth W. V. Sheppard, the Coal Board’s Director of Production, had come to be promoted to the main Board after the Tribunal had severely criticised him for his ignorance of tip stability. To her two excellent questions, there came no answer.”

    “By 1970, the NCB had still not paid the compensation due to Merthyr Council for destroying its schools. However, it had raised its initial offer of £50 compensation to each bereaved family to £500. Bereaved families were being supported out of the Disaster Fund, which at £1.75m was the second largest in real terms ever raised in the UK. Only the Princess Diana memorial fund has ever outstripped it.”

    “On compensation to the victims, the Charity Commission intervened when it should not have done, and failed to intervene when it should have done. It tried to prevent the Disaster Fund trustees from building the arched memorial in Aberfan cemetery, and from making flat-rate payments to bereaved families: they must first satisfy themselves that bereaved parents had been ‘close’ to their deceased children. The Trustees defied the Commission on both points. However, the Commission was silent in 1968 when the Wilson government raided £150,000 from the disaster fund to pay for removing the remaining Aberfan tips. ”

    “The Ministry of Power sponsored and protected the NCB. A contractor claimed that he could remove the tips for a fifth of what the NCB said it would cost, providing that he was allowed to sell the coal they contained. The Minister was advised to reject his offer for two reasons. Firstly, in the words of the briefing, ‘the sale of the coal is a problem’ because it would undercut the NCB’s price. Secondly, the contractor had a reputation for leaving tips ‘in a shambles. NB, NCB will confirm this’. The main author of the Ministerial briefing, who went on to a long and very eminent Civil Service career, apparently did not check the dictionary meaning of ‘shambles’: a place of slaughter.”

  2. Can I make the point that we are far too soft on senior politicians and civil servants? And that’s partially because of programmes such as Yes Minister and The Thick of It. If you present people as harmless comic types, and we laugh in response, then essentially we seeas them harmless in reality. That’s not true. Eventually their mode of expression shifts from obfuscation to downright lies and from well, I didn’t go into that level of detail, to I couldn’t be bothered to find out. And we wind up where we are now with this lot.

  3. Are any judges that presided over SPM cases due to give evidence at the inquiry? I do not think so. They are very much where the ‘buck stops’ in terms of truth, ie, if lies have got innocent people to court, the judge is highly unlikely to counter.

  4. As we watch and listen to those senior figures involved the only agenda they have is to protect themselves and their shaded reputations, they aren’t there to help the victim, they are on their guard to ensure they don’t admit their own failings.
    It isn’t a political hustings, real people were jailed, real families destroyed.
    The old man at the table bleated about mutualisation, money first as usual, the cost of making money more than the cost of the victims.

  5. Funny, I always believed that Government Ministers decide policy and the Civil Service
    implement it … couldn’t be further from the truth listening this bunch of self serving
    idiots.

    Apparently a minister’s job is to sign anything that the Civil Service put in front of them
    without asking any questions at all and the Civil Service is there to implement whatever
    they think is best, usually at the speed of an asthmatic snail, before they leave on a
    gold plated pension with some sort of honour for ‘public service’.

    140 MPs wrote to Vince Cable about the Post Office, but because they didn’t come and knock
    on his door he just sat on his hands and did nothing – speaks volumes about how he handles
    communication with his constituents if he can’t be bothered to contact his fellow MPs.

    Ditto Ed Davey who seems to have reached the limits of his ability while bungee jumping and
    playing on a bouncy castle during the latest election.

    Still it’s better to be thought an ignorant buffoon rather than someone who was actively
    complicit in perpetuating the scandal – also known as The Post Office defence.

    Don’t suppose for one instant that any politician will be charged or that any Civil Servant
    will be sacked, but I continue to hope.

    1. I worked for many years in the civil service (including serving in BIS when Cable was SOS) and I don’t recognise at all the picture presented by some of these Ministers. In my experience, they were more than happy to take a fresh view on policy lines and quibble over standard lines if it was an issue they were interested in. If they didn’t enquire or ask their private offices to get officials in to discuss a contentious matter, that is really a failing on their part. Equally the civil servants should not have been parrotting the lines provided by the Post office without effective scrutiny. Nobody appears to have been doing their job

      1. Is that like the American “don’t ask, don’t tell” ?

        I’d agree that it is up to ministers to query things, but surely the Civil Service has an obligation
        to raise issues when they arise ?

        Show a complete lack of integrity on both sides.

  6. Two further sets of oral evidence by ex-Ministers that don’t really appear to stack up.

    Throughout the evidence given by ex-Ministers they have spun the line that POL was run as an arms-length organisation so they couldn’t intervene directly. Yet Clark testifies that he even considered the ‘nuclear’ option i.e. replacing the POL Board. But if he felt sufficiently empowered to intervene to that extent, then why didn’t step in to prevent POL appealing the first High Court judgment and attempting to recuse the judge?

  7. John Henderson avatar
    John Henderson

    As an intermittent follower I may have missed any previous references to the Shoosmith report of 2012, raised with VC in subsequent questions. Have there been any ? For who was it produced and who got to see it ? It sets out so clearly that there were all the problems this enquiry is now considering that its very absence from daylight adds to the chatges of awkward facts being buried.
    None of the evidence by political persons or their appointees does anything to foster confidence in how the machinery of government works.

  8. Seems to me listening to these clowns that their sole purpose is to sign letters. It would be far cheaper to employ some homeless individuals to fill these ministerial, shadow ministerial posts. From the evidence they gave given I don’t believe anyone would notice. Qualification required= Can write your own name, excellent the jobs is yours. We set such a low bar to be elected as an MP is it any wonder we have fiascos like the PO scandal. The majority of ministers have absolutely no experience in the fields they are supposed to supervise. Basically it is the CS that runs the country with no accountability. When you sign the official secrets act you are held to account should you reveal some detail you were not supposed to. Squander millions of tax payers money on duff PPE, lawyers fees to prosecute innocent SPMs so many cases where the Govt does not give a toss about squandering our money. This becomes quite apparent when it is reported the Govt will spend x to fund y. It is never recorded that the Govt is spending tax payers money to fund y.

  9. Thomas Cooper avatar

    Gvmt ministers never imagined 10-15 years ago that there would be a Statutory Inquiry and thus took the view that whilst there was clearly something obviously wrong at PO there was no way they were going anywhere near the can of worms. It would all be someone’s problem down the line, not theirs. Nice to see them and their (un)civil servants publicly exposed as the useless venal cowards most of us already expected them to be. Of course there will be no consequences for them beyond mild fleeting embarrassment.

  10. That concerned MPs didn’t talk to Sir Vince [VC) about their constituents Horizon problems probably says more about VC than anything! They probably knew they would be wasting their time. This is a man who was in charge of Business, Enterprise and Industry in the UK for many years yet seemed unashamed, even proud, to admit he knows nothing about computers. I was staggered by his lack of curiosity, energy and even intellect.
    Over the past few days it has exposed, to me at least, the lack of handover continuity at every Ministerial level. Not surprising when there is a change of Party but quite bizarre when a new Government of the same “colour” is formed.
    Finally, what was all that about VC wanting to come back to the same job after the 2015 election? He was a LibDem in a Coalition, the chances of that happening again were somewhere south of Zero yet nobody seemed to question the idiocy of such a desire.
    Thanks for these evidence summaries, they are so useful. Even when you have watched most of it.

  11. Sir Vince certainly maintained the standard of his two erstwhile party colleagues, Davy & Swinson. The bar was not so much low, as actually lying on the ground.

    However, Mr. Beer did have one moment of brilliant comic timing. After Cable had talked of his meeting with George Thomson, Beer asked him, seemingly innocently, if he thought that Thomson was ‘a tool……………..of the Post Office.’ That moment alone was worth sitting through a couple of hours of the awful Cable justifying his inexcusable behaviour.

    The fact that Sir Vince then said that he thought Thomson was a man of ‘integrity’ simply added to the moment!

  12. Just occurred to me where are the civil servants? Everyone else is being named and providing witness statements? Who is holding them to account?

    1. Where are the civil servants?!!!
      There have been weeks of them.

    2. Precisely. I would love to see their CVs and/or their appraisals?

    3. Yeah, that’s been apparent to me since I first looked at the Inquiry’s schedule of witnesses. There’s nobody from the Civil Service at all.

  13. Cable was utterly useless. It appears if they aren’t figuratively ‘hit over the head’ with a serious issue they do nothing. Clark was much better and seemed to at least put an effort into addressing issues and supporting subpm’s but, as usual, thwarted by the numerous, ShEks, UKGI’s and various other bureaucratic blocks. This Inquiry has also shown the futility of writing to Ministers, as the letter never gets to them and they are replied to by minions with the usual blandishments. The problem about the lack of governance and accountability can be fixed somewhat by getting rid of the ‘arms length’ rubbish and having a regular, formal face to face meeting between the minister, the department head and the ShEks/UKGI rep. At this (monthly?) meeting, which is minuted and then circulated, there must be detailed discussion of issues and problems which could effect the company concerned. The Minister is then responsible for escalating items to the S of S. Too many of the pollies have got away with ‘not knowing’ about the serious subPM’s and Horizon issues, even after the Panorama and other media reports.

  14. Darnborough Sheila M. avatar
    Darnborough Sheila M.

    Is it not somewhat ironic that so many witnesses’ names have The Right Honorable in front of them but they have acted without much of either?

  15. I’m quite prepared to give the politicians a free pass on that. I know from personal experience as a Civil Servant that as Ministers they are snowed under with issues and firefighting and they pretty much sign anything put in their Red Box providing the advice is strong. they may shout or their SPADS may shout (same thing) on specific issues but its pretty rare because of the turnover. However… how it works is that a PQ or a letter from an MP goes up the chain in the department (letters from Joe Public are dealt with at a very junior level) and scrutinised by “management” – generally at Assistant Sec level – and bounce up and down the chain. If 160 MPs were petitioning the SoS or whatever on a similar issue these people – who are a) smart and b) generally stay in post for several years at least – would notice and should do something about it – its simply impossible that hundreds of letters on different but entirely related issues would not have rung alarms. There is no point lambasting a Minister regardless of their political persuasion – unless they were super invested in the issue already they wouldn’t have noticed – the people who failed (or more likely opted for an easy life) are the people who advised them. It was their job to keep their eye on the ball and they didn’t – simples

  16. Big fan of Vince Cable if a little less than before. Delicate as to the damage selling arms to the Saudis doesn’t mean you feel nothing for the people being roughed up by the Post Office.
    On a lighter note, I very much enjoyed the reference to Normal Lamb (sic).

    1. I’m liking Normal as a first name, honestly

  17. What are the odds that none of the MPs did in fact approach Cable personally? I’d give it about 140-1 …

  18. I didn’t see Clark’s evidence but I did see Cable’s which was a case study in windbaggery. It was a now familiar story. A busy minister with a wide and diverse portfolio reliant on his junior ministers, civil servants and ShEx to keep him briefed which obviously meant, knowing what we know about the work of Vennells, Perkins, Parker, Callard, Parsons et al, that he was deliberately and cynically starved of important information. However, it transpired that, as part of his daily press briefings, he was shown a Private Eye article which summarised the key issues in one pithy paragraph. It couldn’t have been more to the point about all the problems. Unfortunately, Cable couldn’t even be bothered to read beyond the headline, which somehow enabled him to get the wrong take entirely and think it was good news story about transparency.
    The best part of the morning was Jason Beer ‘clarifying’ with Cable that George Thomson (the inarticulate moron in charge of the FSPM) was in fact ‘a tool’, pausing a judicious second or two, before then adding a ‘tool of the Post Office’. Nice work. I think we all got his drift.

    1. john Stephenson avatar
      john Stephenson

      Yes the interpretation of the the Private Eye article summed the whole thing up for me. Useless.

    2. Clark Cable the latest to appear in the epic political version of Gone with the Wind – baggers.

      But they, along with their fellow politicians were mere extras in the Post Office total, then cold war espionage against sub postmasters.

      Those who chose to fight a war against the skint little people by applying contract law that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 19th Century.

      Injustice coupled with disregard for victims of POL actions. A conflict between a State owned organisation and innocent citizens assumed guilty by the State – at arms length. The rules of war drawn up by the aggressor with no checks or balances on the abuse of power. The politicians mere puppets of their civil servant masters.

      Throughout this inquiry the attitude of POL, their subservient highly paid servants from the legal profession and those in overseeing bodies has been…

      Frankly my dear, I couldn’t give a damn.

  19. I thought that Vince Cable commenced well. He came across as articulate, knowledgable, and thorough. It seeemd that he was on the right track when querying the integrity of the allegedly “robust” Horizon system until, alas, he encountered, and sought the opinion of George Thomson of the NFSP. Thomson is belligerent, and one might imagine the conversation that transpired. Perhaps something like this ” now Vince laddie, don’t you go doubting this Horizon system at all because it’s done 93million transactions during the time we have been talking, and everyone apart from the middle one will be near perfect”…………
    I’m afraid things went down the brae after that……….

  20. pity they didnt read the late Frank Field’s MP view on the post office.. excerpt .from Hansard 12.4.2000

    as follows…..

    “However, I have a tale to tell about the state of the project that I inherited. I did not merely talk to colleagues and read the papers; I visited the project partners. Had it been my responsibility to do so, I would have sacked the members of the Post Office board, who were appalling people. They were short-sighted and partisan. They were genuinely unwilling to enter into a discussion that I was trying to have on how to secure the long-term future of sub-post offices. They thought themselves smart; they thought themselves clever. They doubtless accepted their fine salaries, but I doubt whether they served post offices or sub-post offices well, and I am disappointed that many of them are still in post today. Perhaps someone else will deal with them.”

    1. A reminder of the calibre of the much-missed Frank who was always independent-minded and diligent: not very clubbable, he didn’t mind being disliked (by the ‘right’ people) and had the interests of his constituents at heart.
      He was always going to be missed and this diary entry shows how we need people like him.

    2. Thanks for this. Always had time for Frank Field. Prophetic comments.

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