Rod Ismay’s role in the Post Office was senior – he finished as Head of Product and Branch Accounting reporting directly to the Chief Finance Officer. He appears to have taken a leading, or as Jason Beer KC would have it “co-ordinating” role in responding to Horizon challenges throughout his career at the Post Office. This went well beyond his authorship of the disastrous Ismay report, which the Post Office relied on to keep prosecuting Subpostmasters for at least two years.

I’ve written here about Ismay’s first stint at giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. Today, almost exactly a year on, Ismay returned, seemingly much more nervous and fortgetful. His testimony on oath was preceded by the Chair’s notice on self-incrimination – which gave Ismay the right to ask if he might not answer a question if he felt doing so might incriminate him in a court of law. It was an indication that Ismay is a person of interest to the police and Crown Prosecution Service.

You can read my collated live tweets from today’s session in one single web-page here.

Rambling Rod

Today, the fact of Ismay report was more important than its contents. Jason Beer KC who asked questions on behalf of the Inquiry wanted to know more about Ismay’s position within the Post Office’s structure and culture. Was he more of a controlling mind, as his qualifications, seniority and involvement in Horizon rebuttal activities appeared to suggest? Or was he just a hapless chump – willing to look for criminal stupidity in Subpostmasters whilst blithely defending Horizon in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary?

Time and again, Jason Beer pointed to clear evidence Ismay knew about Fujitsu’s capacity to access Subpostmaster accounts. Time and again, this qualified auditor agreed he did have knowledge of remote access to Horizon, or bugs in the system, or red flags raised by independent investigators, but time and again he failed to draw the dots. There was a lot on, he told Beer. So many meetings about so many things. The idea an innocent Subpostmaster might have been suspended, sacked, prosecuted, or sent to prison was very far away from what passed for the front of Ismay’s mind.

When confronted with document he wrote acknowledging Fujitsu’s ability to tamper with Subpostmaster accounts, Ismay told Beer:

“This is written as if at the time I’d got some perception in writing this that perhaps it hadn’t been built. That it was an option that would require some build.”

Beer wanted to know how Ismay had come up with this:

“Where had you got that “perception” from if from the documents we have seen that you were passed made it clear that there was no conditionality? It wasn’t that ‘if Fujitsu could do this, it would be a bad thing’. It was ‘they could do this thing’.”

“Well, I could only think it came from a conversation with IT”, ventured Ismay, before embarking on a long explanation of “a concept” of “a number of options” that would require “a build” to make it function.

Beer cut in to point out that there was no “conditionality” in his email. Ismay insisted it could be “read into” the document, whilst acknowledging:

“I know the narrative in here doesn’t say that, but one writes what one writes and in hindsight you can wish there were all sorts of things you could have written into it and I’m giving you the wider context of what I think could have influenced my thinking and that wider context hasn’t all been written in here.”

Quite.

When asked why, on the basis of what he was now claiming he didn’t know for sure about remote acces and seek to his 2010 report (celebrated in 2013 by the Post Office Chair, Alice Perkins who told him it was “a very good document”), Ismay replied:

“Well because evidently lots of people were aware of it from this and I wasn’t tasked with doing an ongoing update of [sic] report. My… as you can see from the annual appraisal document that we’ve got in this pack you can the number of things that I was involved of which this was a very small part of a wide range of things and so in hindsight, absolutely in hindsight, I wish I’d done something to respond to this, but at the time, with loads of competing pressures, sadly, this one didn’t lead me to do what in hindsight I would wish I would have done to have responded to it but I was doing many many, and I know this doesn’t… this won’t satisfy Subpostmasters impacted by all of this, but I’d got loads and loads of different competing priorities – pre-privatisation – going on and efficiency reviews in my team and so, sadly, I didn’t do something on the back of this. I wish I had, but I didn’t. And I was exceedingly busy with loads of other competing priorities.”

I would describe this as one of Ismay’s shorter answers. Over the last twelve months he seems to have become more incurious, more verbose, more rambling.

A cold mess

Ismay claimed to be a big supporter of Subpostmasters and their work. Yet in 2006, when he saw an email from a Post Office civil litigator Mandy Talbot crowing that the High Court ruling against Lee Castleton “will be of tremendous use in convincing other postmasters to think twice about their allegations”, Ismay quoted it approvingly, adding that the ruining of Castleton:

“should be a considerable addition to our armoury in responding to the number of other cases that may have been stirred up by Mr Castleton’s letters into the Subpostmaster magazine. One letter tried to get something like “class actions”. He certainly had other agents writing in to reply to him and suggesting more cases.”

Ismay said he was “not proud” of this response. investigating these cases to get to the truth of the matter was not Mr Ismay’s priority. And when Beer asked Ismay about what actually happened to Lee Castleton, he replied:

“My belief, from what auditors were saying to me from what they’d found, that there was a genuine theft of something.”

Yet this was one of the most obvious cases of Horizon error across the whole Post Office estate. Lee had the Horizon helpline from the moment there were problems in his branch, explaining everything that was happening, keeping all his paperwork and begging the Post Office to come and have a look at the hardware and/or software in his branch because it was throwing up random discrepancies that Lee was being told were his responsibility.

Ismay told Beer:

“I understood in this case safe doors were open, the office doors were open and someone came back in a state into the office there and there’d been all sorts of audit satisfaction that money had been stolen and so in hindsight that may have been totally wrong and what’s been said by the person who’d written that witness statement suggests that it was not a reliable witness statement that had been put but that was the kind of stuff that was influencing my perspective… that context of auditors went to a branch because there was some suspicion that led them to go there, and when they found all the doors open and the things that were in that statement that would reinforce well… probably there was a theft had happened.”

As we now know, thanks to the Inquiry investigation into the Castleton case, the witness statement by Post Office “auditor” Helen Rose (who had never been trained as an auditor) contained wholly false information. Suggesting the safe and office doors were open later turned out to be a “mistake” on a checklist, and the allegation about drinking was apparently fabricated some twelve months after the event, conveniently, just as the case was about to go to trial. There was no evidence (or indeed allegation) of theft, but that didn’t stop Roderick from sucking up the Post Office cultural narrative. Despite his seniority, training and apparent intelligence.

Lee Castleton was ruined as a result of the High Court action against him. Talbot and Ismay were right – the Castleton ruling was used as a way of warning off Subpostmasters who were considering legal action after being sacked or forced to use their own cash to plug Horizon-generated discrepancies in their branch accounts. Throughout all this Rod (another pious sort, btw) counted his fat salary and looked forward to his comfortable pension.

Of course Ismay is a spoon, but it rather suits him to present himself as one right now. A jury might just buy fatuous stupidity over criminal intent. Either way the legacy of his actions is more than unfortunate, it’s malignant, even by the standards of the individuals complicit in this scandal.

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I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story until Thu 16 May 2024. There are six more dates remaining in Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Surrey and Essex. You can find the specific venues and timings here. All look likely to sell out except Swindon (Mon 13 May) which, for some reason is doing quite badly. If you can make it to the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon, I’d love to see you.

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