In the 15-year Post Office scandal, this may be remembered as the day when hundreds of sub-postmasters, subject to the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, were finally heard.
At Westminster, the Postal Offenses Bill was being rushed through parliament, included in the “wash” triggered by the general election. By early evening, when it formally received royal assent, as if by legislative magic, around 700 wrongful convictions had been erased.
Before that, about a mile east, at Aldwych House, Paula Vennelles finally faced the questions from the subpostmasters, on his third and final day of exams at the Post Office Consultation.
All the force of more than a decade of frustration, anger and injustice was channeled through his lawyers, including a pair of baritones whose questions resonated like fire against the former chief executive.
After two days of painstaking inquisition by investigating lawyer Jason Beer QC, politely laying wires, Ed Henry and Sam Stein KC arrived wearing metaphorical dusters.
“There were so many forks in the road…but you always took the wrong one,” began Mr. Henry.
“You wielded power without thinking of the consequences, even when they stared you in the face?”
When Ms. Vennells tried to explain that she was motivated by “compassion,” he interrupted her. “This is a sham… You preach compassion, but you don’t practice it.”
Paula Vennells arrives to give testimony at the Correios inquiry. Photo: Reuters
In the public seats, the subpostmasters, perhaps 150 of them, beamed. They waited a long time to hear this.
The former chief executive told the inquiry she had spent the last three years preparing for this inquiry, but Mr Henry was not impressed.
He said: “You continue to live in a cloud of denial and this persists to this day… you gave us a witness statement of over 750 pages, a cowardly and self-serving account.”
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The questions were direct, but this was not a random attack. Lawyers focused on the period around 2013 when Ms Vennells admits she was first made aware of faults and defects in the Horizon IT system that could make previous convictions unsafe.
What could have been the trigger to confront past mistakes and right the wrongs of the past became instead a corporate cover-up.
Ms Vennells’ defense was that when it mattered, she did not know the important facts or inappropriate actions because they were not told to her. “I was too trusting,” she said on the first day.
Former deputy postmaster Jo Hamilton leaves after Paula Vennells gave her third day of evidence to the inquiry. Photo: PA
When confronted with documentary evidence she should have known, she said she didn’t understand or “I don’t remember,” a line worn out by repetition.
Occasionally, when cornered by documents, such as the email she sent to her communications director in which she agreed to abandon a full process review because it might generate “front page news,” she would deny that the words she had written meant what they meant. everyone else thought they meant.
All this was said with an air of detachment, occasionally broken by tears that may have been understandable given the tension of the experience, but which did not yield an ounce of sympathy.
See more information:
Vennells removed reference to Horizon from Royal Mail prospectus
Analysis: Day one of Vennells’ evidence
Analysis: day two of Vennells’ evidence
‘Has the mask slipped in this email, Mrs Vennells?’
Sam Stein summed up his approach by avoiding a direct answer to one of his questions.
He said, “You’re doing it again, Mrs. Vennells, aren’t you? You’re saying that other people could – it could have been very nice if they had explained it to me, but you do it as a way of avoiding the problem , which is that, at best, you didn’t ask the question.
“At worst, you knew the answer wouldn’t help the Post Office. That’s what you do, isn’t it, Mrs. Vennells? You distance yourself time and time again and blame these other mysterious people for not telling you the truth.”
The most poignant moment of the day came at the very end when she was questioned by Tim Moloney KC, acting for a group of subpostmasters including Jo Hamilton.
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The Wiltshire sub-postmaster was one of the first to raise her affair with James, now Lord, Arbuthnot, and featured prominently in the ITV drama which raised public concern.
She has campaigned tirelessly, attending every important day of this investigation, and impresses everyone who knows her as a kind and honest soul. She sat next to Moloney as he read an email from Vennell that she wrote to his team following a local news report about his case.
“Jo Hamilton lacked passion,” she wrote. There were boos in the room, and afterward Mrs. Vennells’ apology was barely worth the breath wasted.
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