Morning

Some very sad news. Lisa Busch KC has died after a short illness. Lisa is one of the unsung heroes of the Post Office scandal. This blog post explains her role in the Hamilton appeals in 2021. I got to know Lisa subsequently, and she was just lovely. A very compassionate and bright woman. She will be missed.

Yesterday at the Inquiry

There were three witnesses giving evidence at the Inquiry yesterday. I chose to write about former Business secretary and current Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch, because I think it is important to put on the record (or rather curate and re-present in a hopefully digestible format) some of her thinking on Whitehall processes as well as the wider scandal.

Badenoch is bright, driven and I suspect reminds some people of Margaret Thatcher, with her steely public mask of confidence. Whether she’ll last the five years she needs in order to have a pop at Prime Minister is anybody’s guess, but she’s certainly interesting. Read more here.

The other two witnesses were the current Business secretary Stephen Reynolds (who couldn’t really say much, having been appointed in July) and Fujitsu’s top man in Europe, Paul Patterson.

Patterson was dreadful. In January he was bounced by MPs into agreeing that Fujitsu should help compensate victims of the scandal, and in August he met the formidable young women behind Lost Chances, the group of Subpostmasters’ children who are looking to fund some of their objectives. They haven’t heard from him since.

Wriggling

Patterson was taken to task about this by Subpostmaster representatives Angela Patrick and Sam Stein. His wriggling was pathetic and self-defeating. You would have thought Fujitsu would be able to spare a few quid to help Lost Chances get properly off the ground and start doing some important work, but instead he’s decided to pretend it’s all too difficult for Fujitsu to cope with.

This scandal is bigger than Fujitsu and will dog them until they evaporate. On a very cynical level, they should be supporting Lost Chances out of their PR budget. If Patterson had used yesterday to announce funding for the group, it would have made him and Fujitsu look good, and it would have done good.

Imagine a partnership whereby Fujitsu help a generation of people deal with the trauma inflicted on them by this scandal and work with them on projects which would not only help them, but also make Fujitsu a better company. Instead, they preferred to look slippery and evasive, promising nothing and doing less. People are idiots.

A couple of other takes on Patterson’s evidence:

Fujitsu boss tells Post Office inquiry he ‘doesn’t know’ if Horizon IT is reliable – BBC

No discussion on how much Horizon maker Fujitsu should pay to victims – CEO Paul Patterson says – Sky News

One upside of attending the Inquiry is getting to meet Subpostmasters (and their partners/families) who I fear I will only see sporadically in future. Jasvinder Barang, Terry and Cindy Seeney, Perm Singh, Nicole-Marie Brown and the Lost Chances team – Katie, Katie and Rebecca were all in the house yesterday (among many others). It was great to have a catch up. I stupidly failed to ask the Lost Chances team for a photograph, as I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing a lot about them in the future, and I’m not sure when they’ll all be in the same room again. I am an idiot.

It was also great to say hello to Andrew, Master of the Dark Arts, who uses spells and witchcraft to draw energy from the grid and turn it into a functioning website. Well, two functioning websites, as he also looks after the Lost Chances operation, purely out of the goodness of his heart. Andrew is such a mysterious figure it is always slightly unnerving to see him take human form and appear amongst us, but maybe that’s just me. He was at the Inquiry partly to see The Badenoch Show, but also to chat to Katie, Katie and Rebecca and check he’s still providing a decent service. We had a brief chat even though I was a little distracted by the sheer volume of information coming out of the hearing room.

Andrew very kindly uploaded Emma Simpson’s BBC News piece on Lost Chances to google drive so we can all watch it here.

All over bar the shouting

Today and tomorrow at the Inquiry we’ll be hearing from corporate governance experts Dame Sandra Dawson and Dr Katy Steward, then the Inquiry takes a break until 16 December, when we’ll have two days of closing statements from the core participants.

I have published seven blog posts over the last seven days. I suspect it will be the last full week of intensive activity on this blog, unless there really are going to be criminal prosecutions of the people involved in perpetrating this scandal.

That’s not to say my work on this story is going to diminish. I am in talks to do a couple of non-bloggy Post Office things which I hope to be able to announce in the near future. I am also going to launch a newsletter and website to start documenting my work on gender ideology and its ten year rampage through our institutions.

At some stage over the course of the next couple of weeks, I will send a newsletter inviting those of you who are interested in that sort of thing to consider opting into a free newsletter documenting my take on the gender wars. If this is all a bit new to you and you haven’t been keeping close tabs on it, do sign up and have a look around. Trust me – it’s an eye-opener.

Thank you for all your support over the past six years. It has been fun growing this newsletter from nothing to its current following. You’re all here because you cared enough to invest in what used to be a fairly quirky way of reaching an audience. Now everyone seems to be doing it. Substack schmubstack.

I will post something on Dawson and Steward’s evidence on merit. If I do, I’ll let you know about it. Until then, take care.

Nick

PS If you know anyone who lives in Otley and has nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon, do please send them in the direction of the Otley Courthouse. There are 40 tickets available for the 2.30pm talk I’m doing on the Post Office on 22 November which are stubbornly refusing to shift. We’ve sold 230 across both time slots, but it would be nice to sell out the afternoon as well as the evening.

Brilliantly, the Otley Courthouse website search box doesn’t return any results when you try to find the talk, so you have to know what the specific secret ticket-buying link is. Don’t tell anyone, but it’s this:

https://otleycourthouse.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173656290

I hope it works for you.