At one stage during her evidence, Alice Perkins said she tends to believe, “the cock-up rather than the conspiracy theory of life.” Adding, “I tend not to think that people in large, complex organisations, are conspirators.”
It’s a bit of a cliché, but there’s also a general truth in it. The Post Office Scandal might be the product of a series of incompetents and incompetencies and dozens of tiny, individual coverings of tracks, rather than one dishonest and malevolent bargain amongst the higher-ups in Finsbury Dials.
Or put another way, the Scandal might, to an extent, be the product of more human failings and (viewed in isolation) minor dishonesties than self-conscious criminality of the original gangster kind; greased by disdain for sub-postmasters, hubris and self-regard for the business’s position as a national institution, fear, and the desire to please whoever their overseers were.
Of course, Perkins has to present a cock-up rather than a conspiracy view of behaviours that she had an important role in. The Inquiry may yet find important parts of her story unbelievable and suggestive of far more fault than the kind of corporate apologia that we got from Ms Perkins CB.
But for now, I want to concentrate on the way in which the Post Office’s logic, rather than the people within it, conspired to deny the organisation’s failings and tend towards cover-up.
Jason Beer KC asks a centrally important question, when encouraging Perkins to speculate on why three general counsel, Susan Crichton, Chris Aujard, and Jane “Waltzing Matilda” Macloed, one after the other, fail to reveal significant material legal matters to the Board.
Mr Beer: If, as you say, executive members of the Post Office team were engaged in a process of not revealing serious matters to you, preventing the Board from finding out about them –
Alice Perkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – the first Clarke Advice, the second Clarke Advice –
Alice Perkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – the Helen Rose Report, the Gareth Jenkins report about suspense accounts –
Alice Perkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – why do you think they did it?
Alice Perkins: I don’t know. I really don’t know. I mean, I am a believer, if I can use this phrase, in the cock-up rather than the conspiracy theory of life. I tend not to think that people in large, complex organisations, are conspirators. I really do not know why that didn’t happen but it should have happened. I mean, it is extraordinary that it didn’t happen and I think the thing that – you know, when I saw the Simon Clarke Advice, many, many years later, one of the things that struck me about it was that it was written in such clear language, whereas many of the documents that you’ve been talking about, ones we saw and ones that we didn’t see, were quite technical in nature and wouldn’t necessarily be obvious to somebody who didn’t have a background in those subjects.
But if you read the Simon Clarke Advice, there is no mistaking what it is that he’s saying.
Mr Beer: Looking back on matters now, knowing everything that you do now and having, I think, listened and watched to a substantial body of evidence –
Alice Perkins: Yes.
Mr Beer: – in the Inquiry and read a substantial number of documents –
Alice Perkins: Yeah.
Mr Beer: – was this done to prevent an emerging scandal from surfacing?
Alice Perkins: I wish I knew. I just don’t understand it. So, for a General Counsel to receive advice like that, to put it at its lowest, it would be in your own best interests to share it. Wouldn’t it? I mean, you know, it wasn’t in your best interests not to show it to anybody. So I just – I can’t – I’m sorry but I don’t know – and we can all speculate but I don’t know the answer to that. But I just, I see this as one of a number of failed turning points in this very sorry story. And I do really believe that, in that summer of 2013, things could have been very different, and they weren’t.
….
Mr Beer: Knowing what you know now and knowing very closely at the time the personalities involved, do you believe that the senior executives were trying to deal with the problems themselves in the hope that they could make them go away, without revealing them to the Board?
Alice Perkins: It’s possible.
Mr Beer: Were they concerned, do you think, that the Board members might break things out into the public domain by telling MPs, or even subpostmasters directly, about the matters revealed in the Clarke Advices, for example?
Alice Perkins: I can’t think that anybody would have thought that we would leap from – you know, supposing the Clarke Advice had been shown to me before it was shown to the Board, I would have said, “This needs to go to the Board and we need a proper discussion of this”. If it had gone to me and the Board simultaneously I’m absolutely sure that people would have wanted a proper discussion of it. But that – they wouldn’t have gone – there wouldn’t have been a leap to tell people outside the Post Office as the first reaction; do you see what I mean? I mean, we would have wanted to talk about it amongst ourselves, and get advice on it, and decide – I mean, the first thing we would have had to have done would have been to talk to the shareholder about this.
It is one of the more convincing passages of her testimony. She seems genuinely incredulous. Given the chance to pass the blame, back now in the mists of time, the lawyers had not.
Her reaction is an interesting contrast to the blank denial that greets any suggestion that her own behaviour, that of the Board, or that of her CEO, may have been responsible for this kind of behaviour. She protests that the documents are littered with examples of her welcoming bad news. We are not taken to these. What we do see is how she describes her own and the Post Office’s reactions to bad news.
The most stark example is the reaction of her, and everyone around her who was briefing her and briefed, to Second Sight’s report. Even though no on had seen it they had formed a view that statements in it were probably not properly substantiated. She would have had concerns that the report was, “critical without being properly substantiated.” There had not been time for them to properly consider the Post Office’s evidence rebutting some of their findings. Susan Crichton, you may recall, was deputed to encourage some balance from them.
Of this, Perkins says,
“I am absolutely clear that it was never my intention or the intention of anybody on the Board to influence Second Sights evidenced findings… I don’t believe that was something which the executives were trying to do either.”
And
“[W]hat I didn’t want was for there to be any allegations or innuendo that there was more that was wrong and could be properly substantiated.”
And she was,
“concerned about unnecessary damage to the Post Office, as opposed to unavoidable and properly referenced damage.”
So when she says she welcomes bad news, she welcomes unavoidable, properly referenced bad news.
It’s a common enough approach and one can see the reasons for it in the Board’s reaction to things going a tad pear-shaped.
Vennells gives us a clue to how they reacted initially: they, “were generous in their patience tonight over the [Second Sight] discussion,” prior to Crichton being sent off to talk some sense into them and securing,
“the view that they do now understand the risk of being caught up in something bigger and more sensitive. She is hoping that their report should be more balanced, should say that they found no evidence of systemic Horizon (computer) issues but will confirm shortcomings in support [of] processes and systems, and that the Post Office has already identified and corrected a number of these.”
In March of the following year the Board’s view does not seem to have softened a great deal. Perkins describes it in an email instructing Aujard on a report he is preparing:
“The position is intrinsically worrying (to put it politely) …. The NEDs are really concerned because of the potential costs to the business, the distraction from implementing our strategy (which is demanding enough), the reputational issues and their personal positions. A bad combination made far worse if the business does not appear to be on top of it. So the paper needs to demonstrate that the Board’s concerns on the latter point are unnecessary – if that is possible.”
Putting aside the point that she appears to lead him to a conclusion (a tactic she denies using here and more generally) the Board’s concerns are: cost, distraction from core strategy, reputation, and personal liability.
Bad news pulls managers off-course from imagined success. Their concerns are not whether the bad news is well-founded, at least as described here.
Beer also enjoys pointing out more than once that it is a bit of a mystery why the Board are so cross if they have been told there are no systemic problems in Horizon and the identified bugs and other problems are in hand. Perkins struggles to answer that with any conviction, saying the lawyers advised they had problems and they believed them and the mediation scheme was producing more than its fair share of pain.
Such an evidence-based, sceptical approach to bad news is not matched by the approach to good news.
Perkins is taken awkwardly on a number of occasions to her acceptance of, and sometimes parroting of, good news. This is good news she knows, or ought to know, is not as reliable or as positive as it is being made to appear. In particular, she is seen to give out an inaccurate view at an early meeting with James Arbuthnot that Horizon had already been subject to two independent reviews. These were, in fact, referring to her external auditors, who had revealed to her in their very first meeting with them that there were significant concerns, and an RMG internal audit, which was also not very positive, and had been held out as being reviewed by Deloittes when it had not been.
Improperly referenced good news that does not always exist might be said, not with any great unfairness, to have been the order of the day.
A question of some interest, which the evidence starts to deal with, is the extent to which Perkins probably appreciated some (but not all of) these problems when she held out the audits of evidence that everything was positive whilst offering a further review. This became the Second Sight review.
When I talk about a conspiratorial logic (as opposed to an actual conspiracy), I mean the systematic willingness to rely on and over-promote untested good news alongside the routine, systematic attacking or ignoring of bad news (to enable it to be weakened or discounted). If that practice was done knowingly or recklessly however the logic may harden into something where personal responsibility lies.
I could take you through the ways in which Beer goes further by casting doubt on the competence, and sometimes good faith, of the Post Office’s approach. Here is my abbreviated summary:
It will be for the Inquiry to judge how much cock up they will entertain in their own theory of life on Flat Earth.
