Dull Day: Tedious Chris has nothing to say

I had low hopes. Though I was surprised to be the only journalist in the room (I think).

I kind of suspected Mr Day would not have much to say, even so, a stunning document might surface, never to be seen or heard of again.

Reader, it didn’t. Obviously Mr Day did not wish to say anything of interest, it’s whether he had anything interest to say. I’ve written up his evidence here. If anyone here watched as much of it as I did (ie all of it) and thinks I’ve missed something crucial, please get in touch.

Bates on Manoeuvres

Alan Bates, leader of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance and official National Hero has given word he might sue the government over its failure to properly provide financial redress for Subpostmasters involved in the group litigation. Bates has “no doubt we have the support of the nation and the media if we have to go out and raise the funds needed to go to court again”. It’s a good rallying cry. More here.

Perkins Preview

Former Post Office Chair Alice Perkins’ presence lurks in the shadows of this inquiry like that irritating inquiry cough-merchant. I find Perkins fascinating, just as I found Rodric Williams, Chris Aujard and Susan Crichton fascinating. Until they gave evidence. Then I realised exactly what they were about.

I am holding out some hope that Alice Perkins is different. I am hoping she is a woman of towering integrity, who will speak with charisma and honesty about the Post Office disaster.

Or (worse, but still interesting) she might be someone who comes across as a proper Machiavellian Sir Humphrey-esque baddie – so in thrall to her own intellectual superiority that Jason Beer KC (I hope it’s him) can skewer her at a leisurely pace over two days of questioning.

I suspect, as ever, it’ll be a hopeless anti-climax and we’ll spend several long hours being bored to tears by a robotic English cloaked in deadening corporate management guff.

Either way, I’ve written this Preview of Perkins which sums up what we know so far. I hope it’s of use.

Nerd interlude

Skip this bit if tech talk isn’t your thing.

The best thing about today was taking the MacBook Pro I’ve been using on tour along to the Inquiry [told you!]. I bought the Pro for the processing oomph it guarantees when chunking through a/v and the fact it still has a dedicated HDMi output port (quite important when you are dealing with long cables, big spaces, temperamental projectors etc). I thought it would be far too overpowered (and heavy) to drag through London to the Inquiry, but…

… you may remember from a previous newsletter I discovered the audio recording app (Audio Hijack) I’d been using to strip audio from the Inquiry youtube feed had a transcription block in its armoury.

This was great as it delivered transcriptions of the inquiry (providing I managed to remember to run it) within minutes of each inquiry session finishing.

The trouble was, my dinky M1 Macbook Air really struggled to play the youtube feed, record it and transcribe it all at the same time – to the extent it got super-hot after about half an hour and started glitching/interrupting the audio feed. Not ideal when you are trying to live-tweet.

Enter the daddy laptop. Having transferred Audio Hijack to my M2 Pro and set it running at the Inquiry, it still got super-hot, but kept the audio flowing and transcribed so quickly that by the time I pressed stop on the recording it had already transcribed every word with a 95%-ish degree of accuracy.

This means that by the end of today I had a full (unofficial) transcript of proceedings, making it endlessly easier to find the killer quotes from what was said.

This tech upgrade (I reckon) will save me at least two hours each working day. Which is why I am writing you this newsletter now, rather than first thing tomorrow. It makes me happy, anyway. Okay. Nerd interlude over.

Back tomorrow

Thanks very much to all the new subscribers who have joined in the last 24 hours. Apologies for the tech talk. It doesn’t happen very often. The live tweets from the Inquiry start at 9.45am tomorrow.

Goodnight.

Nick