Paula Vennells was shown to be more concerned with the post office’s public image than what was happening to subpostmasters the other day when she answered questions at the Horizon IT scandal inquiry.
If Paula Vennells’ first day on the witness stand was memorable for her tears and self-justification as she faced public scrutiny for the first time in nine years, her second was less dramatic but more substantial.
During her seven years as chief executive, hundreds of sub-postmasters were sent to prison on faulty evidence produced by the Horizon IT postal system.
Ms Vennells’ defense is that despite her experience – she spent five years in senior roles before taking the top job – she simply didn’t know.
She spent most of the first day discovering just how complete her ignorance was.
Post Office inquiry: Day 2 of evidence from former CEO – How it happened
She didn’t know there were bugs in the Horizon system before she became CEO. She didn’t know that branch accounts could be accessed remotely.
Little did she know that the post office carried out its own prosecutions, a power it had had since the days when Dick Turpin was a bigger threat to the bottom line than the subpostmasters.
The next day was largely preoccupied with what she did when she finally figured out what was going on, and it made ignorance seem like bliss.
During more than six hours of questioning, a picture emerged of an obsession with spin, public relations, media management and the reputation of the post office, which is superior to the mayor of sub-postmasters.
This was most clearly revealed in correspondence between Ms Vennells and the then Post Office communications director Mark Davies.
It was her 2013 proposal that the Post Office conduct a review of all false accounting cases over the past five to 10 years.
The plan never came to fruition, and inquiry counsel Jason Beer asked if it was a “lost decade until the miscarriages of justice were exposed?”.
“Maybe it was enough,” she agreed. “Maybe it worked.
This led to the question of why this had not happened, and part of the answer came in an email from Mr Davies offering his opinion.
“If we say publicly that we’re going to look at recent cases … whether it’s recent history or further back in time, we open it up very prominently to front-page news. From a media standpoint, it becomes very mainstream, very well-known,” he wrote. .
“How much has what Mr. Davies advises here influenced your decision-making?” she was asked.
“I never would — it just wasn’t the way I worked,” she said.
Mr Beer then replied to Mr Davies: “You were right to say that. And I’ll take you behind the wheel, no problem,” she wrote.
“There are two main objectives, the most urgent is to manage the media, the second is to ensure that we address the concerns of JA [James Arbuthnot] and Alan Bates.”
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“I have no sympathy with her,” says Mr. Bates
“You took the PR guy’s advice, didn’t you?” asked Mr. Beer.
Her reply, which she didn’t really remember, was drowned out by jeers from the sub-postmasters in the room, prompting chairman Sir Wyn Williams to call for order.
The inability to remember is a consistent theme in Ms Vennells’ evidence, perhaps culminating when she was asked at a board meeting in 2013: “My recollection,” she said, “is that I don’t remember.”