On 1 Dec 2014 I was in Cornwall, where Tim Robinson, Jane Goddard, Joe Cooper and I had been filming with former Subpostmaster Sue Knight. After 32 years service Sue had been sacked and prosecuted by the Post Office for false accounting. Although the prosecution had been dropped, Sue’s life was falling apart. She had lost her job and reputation and was in the process of losing her home. Her mental health was in tatters.

Our interview with Sue was due to go out in January as part of two films the Inside Out South team were making for the One Show. Whilst we were back at the hotel, recovering from a long day’s filming, Tim received a message from Huw Irranca-Davies, one of the MPs in James Arbuthnot’s parliamentary group. The MPs had decided to publicly withdraw their support from the Post Office’s Complaint and Mediation scheme.

This happened on 9 Dec, when James Arbuthnot was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today Programme alongside his constituent and former Subpostmaster Jo Hamilton. The Post Office’s Director of Communications Mark Davies was also interviewed. Davies suggested the convicted campaigning Subpostmasters had “lifestyle problems as a result of their having been working in Post Office branches*”.

That evening, Tim and I got the first One Show piece out, featuring Sue.

Over the next eight days we worked on the second. For the duration of this period we were in regular contact with the Post Office, requesting an interview with Paula Vennells so she could put her company’s perspective forward.

Our second One Show piece went out on 17 December, the same day as a parliamentary debate, in which the Post Office was described by MPs as “arrogant”, “high-handed” and “duplicitous” (more on that here on a website I really need to devote some time to. It’s quite old).

The BBC are playing games

Yesterday, during former Post Office Chair Alice Perkins’ second day of evidence to the Post Office Inquiry, we saw how this media activity was going down inside the Post Office bunker.

On Sunday 14 December, three days before our second piece, Mark Davies emailed Alice Perkins, Paula Vennells (CEO) and Belinda Crowe (Project Sparrow Programme Director) to tell them:

“The team and I have been working pretty much all weekend on the Parliamentary debate and (frankly) duelling with the BBC over their plans for a further round of broadcasts on Wednesday. A legal letter will go in the morning… Part of the challenge here is that the BBC are playing games: and it may well be that if we can’t provide a spokesperson they can’t broadcast it as it would lack balance.”

Reader, we weren’t playing games, we were doing our jobs. We weren’t duelling the Post Office, we were making a film about Subpostmasters who blamed the Post Office for ruining their lives, and we were looking for answers.

Jason Beer KC, who was questioning Perkins on behalf of the Inquiry asked:

“Do you understand this to mean that refusing to provide a spokesperson would be a tactic used by the Post Office in the hope that the BBC would not broadcast because of a perceived lack of balance?”
“That is what this is saying, yes”, replied Perkins.
“Was what Mr Davies wrote here your view of what was happening: that the Post Office was duelling with the BBC?” Beer asked.
“It would have been his view”, replied Perkins. “I wasn’t engaged in this.”
Beer widened it out. “Was the Post Office viewing itself as being embroiled in a battle against the campaigning subpostmasters?”
“I think it was, yes. I think it was”, replied Perkins.
“Were staff fighting to protect the reputation of the Post Office?”
“People were fighting to protect the reputation of the Post Office, as we now know, based on a completely wrong understanding of the facts.”
“Is that how the scandal was then viewed internally by Post Office staff: a rather bloody PR battle in which they were entrenched against the campaigning subpostmasters?”
“I wouldn’t use those words”, sniffed Perkins

Davies’ Worthy Battle

Beer took Perkins to an email from Belinda Crowe replying to Mark Davies, still on 14 Dec. Crowe told her fellow exec: “we are on really dodgy ground if we get into the detail of cases. However, as you know we have some good answers to some of the points raised and provided we can position this in a way that under no circs can it be construed as commenting on a case we should be in quite a strong position with our statement. I am trying to keep thinking of Kipling.”

Beer wondered if she was calling to mind the famous Kipling poem If:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

“I imagine that that is”, said Perkins. “I’ve no idea.”

Davies responded to Crowe’s reference with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt. “I’ll try to do this justice” said Beer as he read it out to the Inquiry:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who actually does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, with great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end of the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

If ever you wanted a window on a completely batshit corporate mentality, as promulgated by Strong Man Mark Davies, face marred by sweat and blood, beating down those moany Subpostmasters with his bare hands and unlimited financial resources, this was it.

“Does this give an insight into what Mr Davies saw as his role at the Post Office?” asked Beer.
“He must have been feeling under a lot of pressure”, replied Perkins.
“Was it your view that the Post Office team regarded themselves as marred by dust and sweat and blood in a worthy battle against their Subpostmasters?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t have put it like that”, said Perkins.

Whilst Perkins can afford to be glib, this matters. The culture and attitude Davies brought to bear on this scandal had a real world effect. Davies had already persuaded his CEO not to open an investigation into past prosecutions of Subpostmasters because it might cause bad PR, and by Dec 2014 Vennells had become a simpering cheerleader for Davies’ methods.

We’ve already seen the sickening hero-gram Vennells sent to Davies (and Perkins) after our second One Show piece went out on 17 December. The film featured Jo Hamilton, the late Julian Wilson, Noel Thomas, Lee Castleton and a serving Subpostmaster from Nelson in South Wales, called Steve Phillips.

In her email review, Vennells told her team the concerns raised by the campaigning former Subpostmasters left her “bored” and that Hamilton “lacked passion”. The next day Vennells sent another email turning her ire on Steve Phillips. Addressing the Post Office’s top legal person, Chris Aujard, Vennells wrote:

“Chris, if you didn’t see the One Show, please can you watch the clip – again I expect we are best to do nothing at this stage but Steve Phillips is completely out of order, inaccurate at best, lying at worst. And has wilfully collaborated to [bring] us into disrepute. Any views?”

She’s looking to fuck him up.

This email was discussed at the Inquiry yesterday with Alice Perkins by Angela Patrick, Jo Hamilton’s barrister.

Patrick asked Perkins: “is this just another example of the belligerent language we had seen being used in the business when talking about campaigning Subpostmasters? “Wilfully collaborated in bringing us into disrepute”, what do you think of that language?”
“Well, looking at this now, obviously it looks absolutely dreadful”, said Perkins.

But Vennells was proud of herself, and keen for Alice Perkins to see her thoughts, forwarding her both the “bored” email from 17 Dec and the 18 Dec one above containing her views on Steve Phillips.

“Did you take issue with what Ms Vennells was saying?” asked Patrick.
“I may have done but I simply do not remember this”, replied Perkins.
“We’ve seen the first [email] and I’ve read it out, she was congratulating Mark Davies for a job well done. This was a win she wanted you to see, wasn’t it?”
“It would look like it, yes”, replied Perkins.

There is no evidence of Perkins doing anything about her CEO’s language or attitude towards Phillips or the campaigning Subpostmasters. This allowed Davies and Vennells and Crowe and van den Bogerd and Aujard and Williams and Flemington and Singh to continue in their grotesque attempts to belittle and besmirch their innocent victims for another five years.

* Read the full transcript of Mark Davies Radio 4 interview here. It remained the only interview with any serving Post Office executive about the scandal until my BBC Sounds interview with current CEO Nick Read nine years later. Listen to that here.
Read the first Dispatches from the Post Office Bunker, here.
Read more about an emboldened Mark Davies and his interactions with the BBC in 2015 here.
For a full transcript and video of Day 2 of Alice Perkins’ evidence, click here.
For live tweets from Alice Perkins’ evidence, with plenty of document screenshots (inc Davies’ Roosevelt email and Vennells 18 Dec email), click here.
For a write-up of another extraordinary document (discussing Vennells’ sacking) to come out of yesterday’s evidence, click here.
To support my presence at the Inquiry and the writing on this website, see below.

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