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alice perkins
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More dispatches from the Post Office bunker: the PR guy goes Tonto
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…
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The taxi for Paula Vennells which never quite came
A powerpoint slide deck was the most newsworthy element to leap out of former Post Office chair Alice Perkins’ second day of evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today. Thanks to an anonymous nine-page presentation, we know that in February 2014 the government was tempted to sack Post Office CEO Paula Vennells because…
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Perkins in Wonderland: Day 1
The Post Office scandal did not happen, or get covered up because of a single Machiavellian baddie. It happened because a bunch of serially incompetent people spent oodles of other people’s cash groping their way around a crisis without the competence or moral backbone to do the right thing. Alice Perkins, Chair of the Post…
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Perkins Preview: what secrets will Lady Humphrey reveal?
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……