Alice Perkins was Chairman of the Post Office for four years between 2011 and 2015. She got the job after a career spent in the civil service. One of the people who ostensibly worked for her during that period told me Perkins was “patronising… wooden and inarticulate”, complaining she “couldn’t connect with people at all… we used to see her about twice a year and she would give speeches that made you numb with boredom.”

This is exactly what you might expect from a career civil servant. It might serve to lower your expectations for the next two days of evidence, were it not for several tantalising snippets of information which have come out of the Inquiry in recent weeks.

Snippet One

We know for a fact that Perkins was horrified at the way the Post Office General Counsel Susan Crichton had gone about letting independent investigators Second Sight conduct an actual independent investigation into the Horizon system. This was not the way to do things at all. Perkins met with Crichton in 2013, after Second Sight had delivered their report and gave her what for, recording in a note:

“I understood that Second Sight’s investigation had to be independent but in the civil service there would have been someone marking it who was close to all the key people – Second Sight, James Arbuthnot, JFSA [Alan Bates’ Justice for Subpostmasters’ Alliance]) and knew what was going on between them.”

Commission an independent report by all means, but don’t let the investigators be truly independent. Mark them.

Snippet Two

Perkins’ comic book baddie persona took root with another dig at Susan Crichton when she told her CEO Paula Vennells (again in 2013) that Crichton “sees so much as beyond her control. That’s the problem. It’s her alibi.”

Cold.

Snippet Three

Perkins’ knowledge of the civil service dark arts manifests most ludicrously at the hands of her lachrymotic CEO. On 30 Jan 2015 Paula Vennells was preparing for her appearance before the Business Select Committee. In what has become an infamous email, Vennells wrote to her underlings with concerns about remote access to the Horizon IT system:

“What is the true answer?” she asked. “I hope it is that we know this is not possible and that we are able to explain why that is. I need to say ‘no it is not possible’ and that we’re sure of this because of xxx and that we know this because we’ve had the system assured.”

Telling her colleagues of the “need” to say “no it is not possible” has been interpreted as an instruction to find a way for Vennells to tell parliament remote access is “not possible”. But not according to Paula Vennells.

On her first day of evidence to the Inquiry, Vennells (who had mystifyingly waited nine years to correct the record) told Jason Beer KC that the phrasing about her “need” was deliberate, because her boss, Alice Perkins had told her: “if you want to get the truth and a really clear answer from somebody, you should tell them what it is you want to say very clearly and then ask for the information that backs that up”.

Really, Paula?

A half-wit would clock this as nonsense. Vennells apparently didn’t. As members of the public gallery stifled sniggers, Jason Beer KC asked. “That’s an odd way of going about things, isn’t it? ‘I want to know the answer to the question. Here’s the answer to the question’.”

People began laughing, but Vennells stuck to her guns. She maintained the Perkins doctrine – telling people the answer you want to hear and then instructing them to find the information which backs that up – was legit corporate management practice. Not at all the sort of thing a semi-deranged dictator, or manipulative civil servant would demand.

More fool who?

This is what makes Perkins’ evidence over the next two days so interesting. Is she a gormless apparatchik or a mafia don? Which version of Perkins will turn up to the inquiry? The wooden and inarticulate guffler, or the smirking Machiavellian schemer?

Perkins’ likely claims of corporate propriety might be contradicted by contemporaneous evidence, but she is probably clever enough to have left very little trace. She certainly got out of the Post Office quickly enough.

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