The Wine Gums vs The Blob

Margot James giving evidence remotely to the Inquiry today

Putting together a list of Postal Affairs ministers a few years back I was reminded of a graffito written shortly after the 33 day papacy of John Paul I, which asked: “What lasts longer, a pope or a wine gum?”

It seemed apt. At a time when ministers should have been getting a solid grip on the Post Office, they were being spun through the Business Department’s revolving doors, reliant on the misleading briefings they were getting from their own civil servants and the Post Office. Throughout this scandal, the tail was wagging the dog.

Today it was the turn of Margot James (Post Office minister from July 2016 – Jan 2018) to give evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. James said she didn’t arrive in post determined to implement fresh ideas – she just had to “inherit” the policies set by her predecessor, telling the inquiry:

“It’s very automatic, the… identity of the minister is completely irrelevant for some of the time, particularly in the early days, then the work just churns through, and instead of your predecessor signing [letters], you’re signing it all…. when circumstances change of course there may well be a change [of policy] and that would then be yours to approve.”

Emma Price, the barrister asking questions on behalf of the inquiry, asked:
“In the absence of a change in circumstances, would you routinely sit down and approve – or consider whether you wanted to approve – standard lines on agreed policy lines when you took the role?”
“Not as a rule, no”, replied James.

James took over from Baroness Neville-Rolfe, whose tenure from May 2015 to July 2016, was even shorter than hers. Neville-Rolfe didn’t give James any handover, formal or informal. Because James took over as part of a new government – even though it was switching from one Conservative administration to another – all the ministerial departmental knowledge was swept away.

James told Price it was “unfortunate” that she was working with “an entirely new ministerial team and private office team.” She added: “I don’t think my private office had experience of handling any aspects of my brief left over from my predecessor.”

For the first six months James continued to churn out the Post Office party line – there was nothing wrong with the Horizon system, and the Subpostmasters’ complaints were baseless.

Biggest regret

In her witness statement to the Inquiry, James writes that at some unspecified point, she became “uncomfortable” with this. James told Price her growing discomfort was due to the letters she was getting from Postmasters “who tended to write to me directly… After I had received a few of those letters, I started to think that the advice I was getting did not reflect what seemed to be happening to the people who were writing to me.”

Emma Price

Price wondered what aspect of the civil servants’ advice made the minister uncomfortable.
James replied: “The thing I started to doubt was the fact that all of the complainants were guilty of some sort of incompetence, or theft, or false accounting, or the things I’d been told were causing the criticism of the Post Office and its computer system.”

James repeated throughout the day that her biggest regret was not asking to see Second Sight’s Interim or final reports, both produced before she took office. She told Price: “I could have asked them – I want a copy of the Second Sight report, both of them – and I didn’t ask that question.”

James told the Inquiry: “that was possibly my biggest mistake. Especially [not asking for] the second one*. If I’d ever been able to get the second one out of them.”

James’ passivity was a problem. She was told twice in her “day one” briefing pack, that she should get a special briefing on the issues being raised by Subpostmasters. She didn’t get it, but she didn’t ask for it, either. Later in her tenure, James received another briefing note before meeting up with representatives from the Post Office. In that briefing note, there was a specific section on problems with Horizon and the campaign by the Subpostmasters. It said: “Suggest we give you a fuller briefing on this as it regularly flares up.”

There is no record of this happening. James accepts she should have asked for the briefing, but didn’t.

Body language

James said that when she did raise Horizon issues with Post Office CEO Paula Vennells and her cronies: “I felt I was fobbed off, because in general they would find different ways of saying the same thing in response to my questions.” Raising Horizon problems seemed to have visible effect on Post Office staff. “On all occasions there was a change in demeanour – a wish to shut the conversation down as soon as could be done so politely.”

James also noted the Post Office was “very good at presenting themselves as the victim in all this. They came across as beleaguered. What more could they have done? They’ve set up this mediation scheme. They’ve improved their training processes. There were occasional faults, as with any computer system, [but] nothing capable of causing the amount of harm alleged.”

James told Price: “I wasn’t wholly satisfied with this, but that was the sort of tenor of the explanation when I probed more.”

Later in her evidence James expanded on Post Office’s victim mentality – noting examples such as the use of the word “orchestrated” when describing the Subpostmasters’ campaign “as if to say there was absolutely no legitimacy to this campaign whatsoever, that sort of thing. The [Post Office’s] language would be based on an assumption that postmasters were in general guilty of something. It might be fraud, it might be theft, it might be joining an illegitimate campaign to undermine something that the Post Office was doing, like putting a mediation scheme in place.”

There are PhD theses to be written about Post Office’s delusions during its peak flat earth phase – how its exec and board cannoned about between bewildered self-pity, corporate righteousness, pitiless cruelty and ruthless abuse of state power – all in denial of a truth it either knew or feared it knew.

Sadly, James, like all her predecessors and successors, were not determined enough nor had the ministerial bandwidth to crack through it. But it should not have been down to the ministers alone – they should have had support from their departmental civil servants, whether at ShEx/UKGI, or from within the Business Department.

During James’ evidence, Price showed her a July 2016 internal UKGI note about the need to “manage interest and wobbles from the Ministers” including “preparing fall-back options if the current arms-length position becomes untenable.” Another sentence in the same document read: “we are managing Ministers’ involvement, with the intention of keeping the issue independent of Government.”

James told Price: “What is written there… about ministerial wobbles and preserving the arm’s length position… That is not really consistent with the civil service values of integrity, honesty impartiality and objectivity, in my opinion. I think it is an example of a team of people who… have gone rogue and abandoned those principles.”

Terry and Cindy Seeney

At the end of James’ evidence, Sam Stein KC asked a couple of questions on behalf of the Subpostmasters he represents. One of them, Terry Seeney, was present in the hearing room with his wife Cindy. Terry and Cindy kindly came along to one of the live events I did in Wimborne earlier this year. They ran a Dorset Post Office between 2002 and 2006. They are a lovely couple.

Terry and Cindy Seeney

Stein described to James what the Seeneys went through, noting the stresses Horizon-generated losses put on their relationship to the extent Terry was spending so long away from home working on the branch accounts that Cindy suspected him of having an affair. Terry became ill with stress and suspicious. He started searching the bags of the people that he employed within their branch.

Stein asked if family members and spouses were victims as much as the Subpostmasters themselves. James replied:

“I most certainly agree with you, and I would add… the staff in branches as well as family members. Yes, and a whole network, I would imagine, of family and friends. You… touch[ed] on some of the consequences that are not automatically visible to people from this tragedy. When you mentioned the length of time Mr Seeney was spending in the Post Office led his wife to doubt him… it can have, and I’m sure has had, so many effects on people’s friendship groups and their esteem within their community.”

Stein wondered if, therefore, they were deserving of compensation too. James said: “I do agree that they are deserving, of course. Yes I do, most certainly. I mean, that’s obviously for not for me to judge, but that is my opinion, yes.”

After the hearing I asked the Seeneys what they made of James’ evidence. Terry said “They all believe the lie, you know. [It’s all] ‘Oh I should have done this, I should have done that.’ Well, they’re the minister.”

Terry bemoaned the fact it all seemed to be about “hindsight, always: ‘With hindsight….’ Hindsight’s a wonderful thing. Okay, and… The ministers don’t have enough time in their job. They’re moved from one department to another, and no one tells them what happened before. There’s no liaison. They should be given a job [and told], ‘Right, you’ve got that for four years.’ You know, for the life of the Parliament. Not ‘keep moving!’. They’ve hardly got there before they’re moved to another department, and they’ve got no experience of that.”

Cindy ran the shop attached to the Seeneys’ Post Office and helped out behind the counter, but Terry did all the numbers. He kept the losses to himself. Cindy told me how it changed him.

“He wasn’t opening up about anything, and refused to talk about anything. I was left with that suspicion. It was horrible. It was a nasty stress…. he was a right s***.”

Terry’s moods got so bad, Cindy confided her fears to a friend. The friend said: “Go and have a look at him. Stand in the shop and look at him.” Cindy did so. “He looked like somebody different. He was hollow-eyed, yellow-skinned and I thought ‘he’s got cancer’…. shortly after, he developed psoriasis through stress.”

After putting around £10,000 of retail takings and his own money into the Horizon black hole, Terry had had enough. The couple sold the business at a £50,000 loss and then had to remortgage an extra £30,000 to keep their home. Terry says overall they lost around £100,000, which, if they had kept their assets and been allowed to build on them, would have given them a comfortable retirement. For the last 18 years they’ve been just about scraping by. Terry couldn’t work for several years after giving up the Post Office. He used to love being a football referee, but found he could co longer cope with that either. The Seeneys haven’t yet finished all the assessments and paperwork required to get their compensation claim in. They’re not getting any younger.

“But we survived and we got stronger.” said Terry.
“We did.” agreed Cindy.
“It’s all down to her,” said Terry. “She got me through it.”

* Second Sight actually produced four-ish reports – the Interim Report in 2013, a second report in 2014 (split into two distinct reports) and their final report in 2015. The 2014 report(s) were a foreshadowing of the final report produced on demand for MPs who were getting increasingly agitated about the mediation scheme, its apparent lack of progress and what they were hearing via their constituent applicants about everything going pear-shaped. The second Second Sight 2014 reports, perhaps best thought of as interim interim reports, still attracted a furious rebuttal from the Post Office. The final Second Sight report was a firming up of the 2014 reports and was much stronger. It suggested Second Sight’s work was not finished, but sadly they got sacked shortly after delivering it.

For a blow-by-blow account of James’ evidence with the documents presented to her, click here.


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18 responses to “The Wine Gums vs The Blob”

  1. peter v richards avatar
    peter v richards

    DurIng her testimony to the inquiry, the Baroness mentions her Briefing note by Laura Thompson where she is repeatedly reassured that Horizon is unimpeachable. The Baroness obviously relies heavily on this advice.
    So where is Laura Thompson of ShEx in all this? Where did she get her information? and why is she not on the witness list (as far as I can see)?

  2. Is there a job description that explains what the role of the Post Office Minister should be? So far it seems as though they aren’t responsible for anything, so the Post Office is a theoretically private company, but with no commercial risk and effectively no shareholders.

    Is Great British Energy supposed to have the sane public/private structure as the Post Office?

  3. Callard
    of course kept information from Ministers, but Ministers could have insisted on seeing material. I do not quite understand why, when Neville-Rolfe asked Parker to review past cases, she did not apparently follow-up on it.

    But the ultimate baddie in all of this is Vennells. She worked for POL from 2007 to 2019, latterly as CEO, and she fed the lies to Callard which he parroted to Ministers.

  4. I keep thinking back to that meeting with my former SPM client in 2001 (or possibly 2002).
    I had seen him every year for more than 20 years and I would never see him again but this last time he was different, very different.

    It wasn’t just what he told me about Post Office management, the NFSP and the ‘common knowledge’ amongst SPMs of problems associated with the new computer system. I’d always found him to be entirely trustworthy, calm and unruffled. This time he seemed to me to be seething but he was insistent on declining my offer of any help I might be able to give. I could and would have written to our local MP; not that I would have had any great expectations of that but it would, at least, have put something ‘on the record’.

    He told me that he wanted to pass the SPO on to his son on his imminent retirement and that kicking up any kind of fuss would scupper that. I was left wondering though why his son would not be better off ‘out of it all’.

    It wasn’t long before both he and his son were ‘out of it’. I spotted a planning application in 2004 to convert the former Sub-Post Office and flat above it into a private residence.

    How long did it take for MPs to actually ‘cotton on’ to what was going on in hundreds of constituencies all around the country?

  5. Thomas Cooper avatar

    Thank you Nick for bringing real people back into the narrative. The real impacts are all too easily forgotten as the enquiry delves deeper into who said what, knew what, and when. Then the sentences “For the last 18 years they’ve been just about scraping by. Terry couldn’t work for several years after giving up the Post Office.” That’s what this is really all about. Real people with destroyed lives caused by corporate stupidity and individual corruption by executives and their minions, and for an unlucky number a legal process that incentivised false pleadings to avoid harsher penalties.

    They ALL need exposing; the civil servants (actually drivers of the whole as a cover-up), the poor quality ministers who failed to ask questions, the entire House of Commons cohort of MPs throughout the 20 or so years who bar a few notable exceptions just looked the other way, solicitors & barristers who failed to help their clients and looked for the easy way out every time, judges who had to be suspicious of much of what was presented to them but just churned through the process (not enough examination of this issue I think), the PO executives who pocketed large salaries and bonuses, middle managers who didn’t give a toss about anything except promotion and money, and more junior employees who acted as “thugs in suits (& skirts)”. It is a hell of a cast list, and NONE should be allowed to escape.

    Likely the only exposure for this cast of evil will be done by investigating journalists. The enquiry report will in a fashion just be put in a drawer and everyone in positions of authority (& culpability) will hope the whole matter will quietly go away. Sorry Nick, rather than being nearly finished, I think you have a lot more to do to publicly expose and incinerate the reputations of these callow and callous people. They can’t sadly all go to jail, but they can all be shown up for what they are. Keep up the good work !

    1. What an excellent middle paragraph! Well done, and thank you.

  6. Sharon Rimmer avatar

    You only have to watch Yes Minister and Yes Primeminister to see just how the Civil Service runs the Ministers etc Margaret Thatcher once commented that they are very accurate on how they run things and you have to be a very strong Minister to deal with them . All of which is apparent in the evidence being presented now to the inquiry.

  7. I think we need an urgent review of UKGI’s conduct of its current supervisory tasks. What other bodies are going badly wrong while UKGI fills in its risk matrix tick boxes?

  8. My experience with civil servants during my interface with MOD personnel was of a curious nature of how promotion was achieved. They went in front of a board & if successful were promoted out of the department they had gained experience into a department they had no experience in E.G. Someone with electrical experience was then put in charge of a plumbers department. This appeared to be the norm. No private company could have survived if they worked the same way. Normally you are promoted upwards in the department/office you offer the best chance of improving. The Govt appears to apply the same principles. First have a very low bar to become an MP then have them advised by CS who have probably little experience of the outside world. The worrying fact is even if we can change the Govt the same system prevails just a different minister. There also appears to be no accountability for any MP/CS who have wasted tax payers money through ignorance or incompetency. If this happened in a private company where shareholders profits were affected in the same manner they would be straight out the door.

  9. As suspected you get a ministerial job if you have been loyal to the current leader, you know absolutely nothing about your job, you rely entirely on the Civil Service. You sign letters then move on, or get moved on. Not even a proper hand over.
    Shex had gone native and joined the PO cult.
    If there is a operational risk that could destroy the reputation and business of a ALB, the Department must intervene.

  10. I think you should study Baroness Neville-Rolfe’s oral evidence. Contrary to my prior expectation, I found her (much) more impressive and believable than any of the others I have seen. She was very quickly on to the possibility there was something wrong going on and she went on to distrust POL, then thought ShEx had gone native and even began to doubt her own team. She collared the new chairman, Tim Parker (against advice to her) before he could get into his chairman’s office, let alone sit down. And got him to promise what became the Swift Review. She was blocked from getting a copy of the review but I think she would have managed to get further except she was swept out of office as one of the benefits of Brexit. And it seems, as a matter of policy, one minister’s findings are only passed on to the next via officials. So it was pretty much all lost.

    And, of course, thank you for your astounding work on all this.

    1. I’m listening to Baroness Neville Rolf’s evidence in between other stuff. From what I’ve heard so far, it does sound as if she was a beacon in a sea of mediocrity, in that she quickly cottoned onto the PO bullsh*T that was being shovelled her way by Shex officials. Her removal from post in July 2016 is yet another thing we can attribute to Brexit.

  11. You should maybe write a bit more about James’s predecessor, Baroness Neville -Rolfe’s evidence to the enquiry Nick. I say this because, as with Swinson, she pretty much accused ShEx man, Richard Callard, as deliberately witholding important information and being a conspirator in cynically manipulating the narrative in PO’s favour.
    She also called out fluff-haired PO Chair Tim Parker for sitting on the damaging Swift report and suppressing key facts about Horizon’s flaws.

    1. Completely agree with you Marcus. After the lawyers (just about all of them on the PO side and led by the odious Parsons) the most contemptible character has definitely been Richard Callard. Of course there is a never ending list of disgusting people that need to face punishment – the Chairs and execs of POL, various staff at POL and Fujitsu including investigators, witnesses to courts etc but the lawyers and ShEx/UKGI were there specifically to prevent these terrible things happening. If the lawyers and ShEx/UKGI had done the right things then this scandal would not have gone any further because the POL Board and Ministers would have had to have acted to put matter right twenty odd years ago. Not only did they not prevent these miscarriages of justice they did everything in their power to cover them up and actively misinform the various Ministers and Secretaries of State as to the real facts of the scandal. Callard, when giving his evidence to the Inquiry, was extremely arrogant and slimy. He clearly thought that he was superior to all at POL and that it was his job to keep lying to the Minster(s) to keep the show on the road. He showed a complete lack of empathy and a cocky self-righteousness. I would add that these people are not ‘civil servants’ in the conventional sense but ex corporate bods who then seem to float around doing a bit here and there without any real delegation or rules of engagement. The whole system needs total reform.

      1. Callard worked for accountants Arthur Andersen (AA). I knew a recruiter/headhunter who loathed candidates from AA (almost foamed at the mouth at the mention of their name) as they were arrogant with nothing to be arrogant about. Remember it was AA that presided over such great frauds such as Enron, WorldCom, and Sunbeam Industries. So Callard siding with the PO fraudsters was just following a great AA tradition.

  12. Dewi Eirwyn Lewis avatar
    Dewi Eirwyn Lewis

    Caught up in the whole scandal, was advised by Stephen Bradshaw to plead guilty or else! He convinced me that I was guilty and to make up a story to reduce length of sentence.

    1. You have my sympathies for your ordeal. I’ve watched Steven Bradshaw’s evidence and he is an odious little twerp whose arrogance and ignorance prevented him from seeing his own failings or admitting that he was a bully and an incompetent promoted well beyond his own, very limited, abilities. Since he has been given the right to avoid incriminating himself warning, I sincerely hope he is properly investigated and punished for his role in this outrage regardless of whether he was “just following orders”.

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