Strange to think the northern lights have been glimpsed in public more frequently over the past few years than the former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells. I didn’t see the northern lights last week, but I will see Vennells close up next week, when – at very, very long last – she presents herself before the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal.
Polite notice: if your attention has drifted slightly after the fireworks sparked by ITV’s sensational drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office earlier this year, next week is the time to return with laser-like focus to this story. Post Office is once again box office – and remember, NOT ONE PERSON has yet been held accountable for what happened. Alan Bates has just rejected his second “derisory” offer of government compensation.
Briefest of recaps: owing to computer errors denied then covered up by Post Office and Fujitsu, hundreds of subpostmasters were wrongly convicted and in many cases jailed for theft and false accounting, in what has been called Britain’s most widespread miscarriage of justice.
And so to a person very much of interest to the inquiry. The past few years have seen Vennells resign as a non-executive board member of cabinet office, hand back directorships, the chairmanship of an NHS trust and (eventually) her CBE, and “step back” from her duties as an Anglican minister. Her public statements have been apologetic – and written. Not only have we not heard her speak, but she has been barely spotted by reporters already used to having her put the phone down on them. Incidentally, we learned yesterday at the inquiry that Post Office’s former chief information officer had ended up blocking Paula’s number after she became uncomfortable at her former boss’s repeated calls asking for help to “plug memory gaps” and “to avoid an independent inquiry”.
The only sighting in recent times came courtesy of Channel 4 News, which found Vennells leaving a church graveyard on her bike, without comment. The footage is arresting (not literally, of course – unlike all the post office operators, Paula has never been arrested). There is something almost tragic about the spectacle of a rather shaken 65-year-old woman pushbiking away from a cemetery, head down and silent.
Given the terrible things the organisation she ran did, many will bristle at the idea that Paula Vennells could be placed even in the same postcode as the term “tragic figure”. And, of course, infinitely worse tragedies were available. Lives were ruined. At least 60 post office operators have died without seeing justice, let alone compensation, while at least four took their own lives. The mental toll on hundreds more – thousands, considering their families – is incalculable. Furthermore, other alleged villains are available in this story, from the Fujitsu side to former government ministers and civil servants who – spoiler alert – Vennells will next week claim knew far more than they suggest.
But in the old-fashioned literary sense, Vennells has become for many the central player in a tragedy. Her inquiry appearance will, among other things, be an attempt to work out her fatal flaw: what is it about this seemingly mild-mannered, devout woman that caused her to preside over a reign of what I can only ever think of as total corporate psychopathy? How did these terrible things happen? How was such appalling pain and shame visited on innocent people, while this person was garlanded?
It’s hardly the first time in history this question has been asked, but why did someone who would have regarded herself as good and pious preside over such bad and grotesquely immoral things? And is there something reflexive about institutions and power in this country that aided and abetted what happened? Is a stunning lack of curiosity Britain’s cardinal sin of omission?
Aside from Vennells’ Anglican work, perhaps there was something religious-adjacent about Post Office. Certainly, as the Horizon scandal moved from foul-up to cover-up (still continuing, by the way), its management seems to have behaved rather as figures in various faiths used to when told something absolutely ghastly about a priest. There seems to have been a general conviction that stones were best left unturned. If anyone should be blamed, it was the victims. And so their awful and inexcusable suffering continued, and more victims were added to the pile.
For the C-suite gangs, the stakes are currently rather lower. Though the Horizon inquiry is now statutory, no charges have ever been brought against anyone who might have been responsible for the scandal. (Today it emerged the former Post Office general counsel is overseas and refusing to cooperate with the inquiry.) Will criminal investigations and charges follow its conclusions? It would be nice to think so.
Whether it would be realistic is another matter. It’s hard to escape the idea that in this country (and others), there is a class of people who go to jail and a class of people who get directorships, and there is close to zero crossover. If you are a little post office operator who steals a relatively tiny amount of money – or doesn’t, as it turned out – you can end up in prison. If you are the big person in charge of everything when many of these post office operators were getting wrongly banged up, you get paid relatively vast amounts of money and can end up on the board of Dunelm.
Having for so long been a story people found arcane or boring, the Post Office scandal is now joined up in the collective consciousness with all those other scandals in which people suddenly realised there was one rule for the little people and another for the top dogs. So it’s crucial that justice is seen to be done. Otherwise, what are we supposed to conclude is the lesson? Don’t be a little person? Any society in which people learn that too often has trouble in the post.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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