The former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells would like the victims of the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history to know that she hasn’t actually done anything deliberately wrong, and that she honestly doesn’t understand how all this has happened. I guess she’s asking all the jailed and wrongly convicted subpostmasters to try to imagine being swept up in a Kafkaesque nightmare of undue blame. So … please add the murder of irony to her notional future charge sheet.
To Aldwych House in London, then, where Paula produced tears in time for the lunchtime bulletins and reprised them for the section in which her emails seemingly found her on a fishing expedition for other “contributory factors” that might have caused an appallingly persecuted subpostmaster to take his own life. More on that horror show later. For now, let’s just say Paula Vennells now “can’t recall” more about the Post Office than you’d expect a tenuously engaged CEO on 700 grand a year ever to have known.
Vennells was sworn in on the Bible with a beatific smile. Trying to recall the last time I saw that unsettlingly detached expression, I realised it was being worn by Liz Truss the day she sat in the Commons listening to her emergency chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, dismantle her entire economic programme in dispatch box drive-by.
Pressed early by the inquiry’s Jason Beer KC how on earth she hadn’t known what was going on, Paula explained: “I was too trusting.” Barely a quarter of an hour later this humblebrag had done a complete 180, as she said: “I was sometimes criticised at team development events for being too curious.” Was she? At one stage Vennells had even been unaware that her organisation employed a team of about 100 enforcers driving private prosecutions. I’m reminded of those people who worked for Bernie Madoff on the 18th and 19th floors in his offices, and somehow didn’t realise he and a crack unit were running the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme on the 17th.
By the way, when you exit the lift on the fifth floor of Aldwych House, a sign points you in one direction for the Infected Blood inquiry, and another for the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry. British officialdom’s supremely arrogant lack of curiosity: destroying lives since British officialdom began. But as chair Brian Langstaff’s immensely powerful report into the infected blood scandal proved earlier this week, these walls can really talk.
Today they were hearing the testimony of an absolutely key figure in the Post Office scandal – who hasn’t uttered a word in public on it for almost 10 years, much to the anguish of the many subpostmasters packing the room to finally get a bit more clarity on how their lives were, y’know, ruined by the organisation she ran. Huge numbers of people, once told they were the only ones having problems with Horizon, were in the inquiry room, from Alan Bates to Jo Hamilton to all the other victims who’ve become accidental public figures. In the breaks you could hear many of them exchanging their takes on Paula. “No contrition.” “Very corporate.”
Memorable exchanges were also available in the evidence. Take the texts between Paula and the former Royal Mail CEO Moya Greene from only earlier this year, which were projected excruciatingly on the big screen, and read like dialogue in a bad daytime detective drama. “I think you knew,” Greene typed to Vennells. “How could you not have known? … I can’t support you now after what I have learned.” Paula explained to the inquiry that her obliviousness was something to do with the lack of “corporate memory” about the birth of the Horizon system. Alas, Beer – and forgive the slide into legalese – simply didn’t have time for this shit, replying: “How come we’ve been able to find it out just by asking for the documents?”
Oof. Top takeout? Paula Vennells is sorry in an incredibly passive-voice sort of way. She is sorry “that that was the case”, sorry “that it can be read like that”, sorry “for all that the subpostmasters and their families have suffered”. But who made it the case? Who wrote it like that? Who caused the subpostmasters and their families to suffer? Come on, Saint Paula: put your finger on it.
It’s absolutely wild that Vennells was reportedly the current Archbishop of Canterbury’s personal pick for Bishop of London, the third most important position in the entire Church of England. Justin Welby has certainly mastered the passive voice himself, declaring recently “more questions should have been asked” about Vennells. Yes! By you! “My faith does not write the [Post Office] strategy,” declared Vennells in one breezy interview from her early years as the organisation’s CEO. “What my faith does is motivate me around how I deliver it.” Righto.
Watching Vennells today, I found her a wholly inadequate holy inadequate, and kept wondering what was really going on beneath the mandated contrition. Maybe she still hangs on to the secret conviction that subpostmasters were actually on the take, or being led into temptation, as one of her emails put it in a weirdo echo of the Lord’s prayer.
Speaking of living her values, we must return, heartbreakingly, to the suicide of Martin Griffiths. Despite having been the victim of an armed robbery at his branch, Griffiths was deemed partly culpable for it as well as relentlessly pursued over a Horizon shortfall. On the afternoon of the day Martin walked deliberately into the path of an oncoming bus, Alan Bates wrote a witheringly furious email to Vennells and others informing them about his desperate action, judging of this institutional “thuggery” that the Post Office “got him in the end”.
He quoted Martin’s family’s own email to him: “May God forgive them.” That very evening Vennells was on the Post Office internal email, pointing out there were “usually several contributory factors” with suicide, and that “accusations of blame were unhelpful”. Within days she was asking for “background” on Mr Griffiths and any previous mental health or potential family issues – presumably any and all speculative causes other than “hounded to death by the Post Office”.
It’s easy, when you hear this level of corporate psychopathy, to think this inquiry was always an inevitability. But it wasn’t. This was a way of operating that Vennells and the organisation she ran got away with for so long because people couldn’t or wouldn’t believe what the victims were saying. You have to keep reminding yourself of this, even when you’re sitting in the middle of it.
And then, in the loos during one of the breaks, you suddenly find yourself washing your hands next to someone played by Monica Dolan in the highest-rating, most history-making TV drama of the entire year. Funny – not to say extraordinary – how things turn out. Suffice to say the inquiry continues.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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