In February 2019, the Post Office was in the middle of its disastrous Bates v Post Office group litigation. The Common Issues trial had finished and the Horizon Issues trial was due to begin on 11 March. The Common Issues judgment had yet to land. The Post Office was jumpy.

Towards the end of former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells’ second day of evidence at the Inquiry, we got a weird insight into the delusional mentality running rampant at the very top of the organisation during this period.

On 21 February 2019 the government representative on the Post Office board, Tom Cooper, pushed an email into the Post Office’s litigation bunker. It was addressed to the Post Office General Counsel Jane MacLeod, with a circulation list including Vennells, the Post Office chairman Tim Parker and Andy Parsons from the Post Office lawyers Womble Bond Dickinson. This was a message from the Shareholder Representative to the Post Office’s top execs and legal advisors.

What weighty matter needed the attention of this powerful group of people?

Journalists. Specifically, ones who overstate things.

Cooper, apparently in ignorance of both the right to free expression and defamation law, asked:

“To what extent can the court protect the Post Office against journalists overstating the evidence re Horizon? If a journalist writes that there is evidence of systematic problems with Horizon when in fact no such evidence exists, will the court help us?”

Eh?

“Seems to me”, he continued “it’s extremely important to have a press strategy that seeks to stop misrepresentation by journalists and seeks to protect the Post Office’s business today against the implication that the current system doesn’t work properly. Grateful if you could come back to us on that.”

Wha?

Was a member of the government seeking legal advice from the Post Office’s top lawyer on whether or not the High (?) Court could “protect” the Post Office from journalists “overstating” evidence?

What was he hoping might happen? And how? It really does beggar belief.

Robust! Robust!! Robust!!!

Today Vennells repeatedly told Jason Beer KC that she was not a legal specialist and left legal matters to her legal team. On 21 February 2019, however, she threw caution to the wind and came back to Cooper with a reply of her own, possibly because McLeod had developed a 1000-yard stare and was shaking uncontrollably.

“Yes we defend robustly but we avoid adding extra coverage” wrote Vennells, in a strangely robotic metre. Then came the Hollywood line, best read with a gravel-voiced American accent:

“As before we hold the ground: the system is robust.”

Double-robusting in two sentences is a potential sign the word was beginning to haunt Vennells’ dreams as well as her waking life. But wait, there’s more. And it’s gibberish:

“And not comment any further during the trial. So ‘aggressive’ no, robust – absolutely no question.”

Was she rocking back and forward as she dictated this?

“We are trading well. We will continue to trade well”, she reported, definitely muttering to herself by this stage. “The system (enhanced since 2010) works and the trial doesn’t change that. A very firm line.”

A very firm line. The defences will hold. We are trading well. All is robust.

Then there’s some stream-of-consciousness stuff: “we don’t engage in any public debates, we have strong lines but we add no oxygen by commenting or engaging. This is not new news despite how the claimants will present it as that; our approach is to curtail interest as much as possible. And of course, we will respond differently if circumstances dictate. We will be all over it.”

Vennells then turns her attention to Cooper’s question “re how far we can go ‘legally’” (that’s ‘legally’, not legally).

This question, she tells Cooper, is “important”. The answer is:

“We have used injunctions” [reader, they hadn’t] “and demanded apologies in the past”. This does sound like a reasonable press strategy and not remotely an unhinged method of dealing with the media. Vennells counsels Cooper: “They are both to be used but with caution.”

At the Inquiry today, barrister Jason Beer KC did not ask Vennells (as must have been the temptation) if she was okay when she wrote this. Instead he said:

“When had you used injunctions in the past?”

“I’m not sure actually” replied Vennells, with the air of someone who was now regretting climbing to the top of Mount Pleasant sorting office and screaming “ROBUST!!!” repeatedly for several hours a day during the late twenty-teens. “I may have got that wrong.”

Hmm.

For my other piece on Day 2 of Vennells’ evidence, which is a bit more serious, please see Vennells Day 2: Cover-up Finally Acknowledged

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