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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Marina Hyde

Rev Vennells wept but couldn’t remember much about sending innocent subpostmasters to jail. All so long ago

Paula Vennells arrives at the Post Office inquiryin London on 22 May 2024.
Paula Vennells arrives at the Post Office inquiry in London on 22 May 2024. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

The former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells would like the victims of the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history to know that she hasn’t actually done anything deliberately wrong, and that she honestly doesn’t understand how all this has happened. I guess she’s asking all the jailed and wrongly convicted subpostmasters to try to imagine being swept up in a Kafkaesque nightmare of undue blame. So … please add the murder of irony to her notional future charge sheet.

To Aldwych House in London, then, where Paula produced tears in time for the lunchtime bulletins and reprised them for the section in which her emails seemingly found her on a fishing expedition for other “contributory factors” that might have caused an appallingly persecuted subpostmaster to take his own life. More on that horror show later. For now, let’s just say Paula Vennells now “can’t recall” more about the Post Office than you’d expect a tenuously engaged CEO on 700 grand a year ever to have known.

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