Mrs Paula Vennells is the former boss of Post Office Limited, a private limited liability company under the laws of England and Wales, which has one shareholder, being His Majesty’s Government, and one job: to deliver the mail. (It has more jobs than that but just posting a letter seems to have caused the Post Office quite enough trouble without complicating the picture.)
Without rehearsing the entire story (you can root here as much as you please, and here is a short video intro to the affair), Mrs Vennells is presenting evidence to an inquiry into why the company she used to head up prosecuted sub-postmasters across the United Kingdom on grounds of theft, fraud and not adding things up properly, and yesterday’s session with her at the questioning of Mr Beer, King’s Counsel, was a hoot.
A principal problem with the Post Office’s involvement in what has been described as the most outrageous miscarriage of justice involving a public British institution in the entire history of the United Kingdom was the fact that postmasters maintained that their accounts were being changed from outside the system, sometimes before their very eyes, but without their say-so or knowledge (except when it was done before their very eyes). This was vehemently denied by the Post Office (even when it was done before their very eyes).
In 2015, Mrs Vennells needed to go talk to the government about the problems that had arisen in her company and was briefed the day before her appearance on what she was to say. Yesterday, we got to see what she was to say. She was to say that there is no functionality allowing outside interference in the postmasters’ accounts. If pushed, she was to repeat that. And if pushed again, she was to say that there is a functionality. Mrs Vennells recognised no contradiction in this advice.
To quote The Guardian:
The day after her testimony, the Post Office sent MPs a letter saying there was “no functionality in Horizon” for anyone at the company or Fujitsu to “edit, manipulate or remove transaction data” in a branch’s accounts.
However, the inquiry has seen a transcript of a call from 2013 in which a senior lawyer confirmed twice that Vennells had been briefed about a “covert operations team” that could adjust accounts remotely.
Mrs Vennells was briefed in writing on how to present this blatant contradiction.
Mr Beer posited that she was presented with a recommended strategy, and she was asked whether that made sense. No, it didn’t make sense, she said. You cannot prepare for such a thing as a select committee of the government: they ask the questions, you provide the answers.
And, in that, Mrs Vennells is at best disingenuous and at worst a barefaced liar. For, if she cannot discern a strategy in the briefing given to her for the select committee, I certainly can, and it is this:
1. Lie.
2. If lying doesn’t work, lie again.
3. If you’re really up against the wall, tell the truth, but say it’s a completely different thing from the question you were asked.
Mrs Vennells was, previously to her Post Office headship, a vicar in the Anglican church. One is left with a quandary, one similar to that presented by the outrages of paedophilia uncovered within the Roman Catholic Church: the question turns from being how do so many churchmen yield to these abhorrent weaknesses of the flesh? into don’t all churchmen therefore yield to such weaknesses?
In Mrs Vennells’ case it has to be does her inability to recognise the briefing to her as a strategy of deception and concealment stem from her own innocent faith in others, or her blind belief in her own divinity, so that there is no strategy to cover up her foibles, because she has no foibles?
By the same token, the hesitations that come as Mrs Vennells gives evidence at the inquiry could be flashes of contrition, realisations of the harm she has caused in the world. Or they could, yet again, be delaying tactics, while she figures out a way to give an answer that doesn’t answer the question.
The problem with Mrs Paula Vennells is the fact she used to be Reverend Paula Vennells. Her taking the cloth was a calling to God. So where was God when her company was ruthlessly sending innocent people to prison?
The Guardian pages referenced above contain a film worthy of watching. It is a compilation of statements by those who suffered at the hands of the Post Office. It is very telling in every respect. Watching it will bring home to you the horrors that ordinary men and women had to endure in this sorry debacle. But one phrase in particular will, if you’ve never uttered it yourself, tell you more than any other what it is to suffer a depression that smothers you as your world crumbles in on itself. If you have uttered it, then you know how that feels:
I wake up in the morning, and I’m actually disappointed that I’ve woken up.
The inquiry continues.