BY PAUL T HORGAN

Hannah Arendt was wrong when she used Adolf Eichmann as an example of the concept of the banality of evil. This was perhaps a method of denigrating and trivialising an object of dislike or disgust. We see this all the time when socialists mock and insult the institutions that they despise from the monarchy downwards. Eichmann, Nazi Germany’s top bureaucrat charged with organising the deportation of European Jews and others to be murdered in death camps, was not banal, nor was he glamorous. But there was pomp, pomposity, and perverse flamboyance present at all levels of leadership in Nazi Germany as they strutted around their gleaming offices in designer uniforms made by fashion clothier Hugo Boss. Shorn of the scrutiny associated with democracies, dictatorships are inherently corrupt. Their structures also encourage the growth of mini-empires of competing interests, and Nazi Germany was no exception, especially when these private reichs were all seeking to curry favour with their leader by trying to be the best kind of Nazi they could possibly be.

The former CEO of the Post Office, Paula Vennells, is not quite as bad as Adolf Eichmann. 

She is actually far worse.

Eichmann was an evil man implementing an evil policy in an evil organisation controlled by an evil government that had turned his country in an evil direction, the consequences of which influence politics in that country and the wider world to this very day. Vennells is a Christian, but not the census-box-ticking Christian, or the hatch-match-and-despatch-only Christian, or indeed the regular church-goer Christian. The Reverend Paula Vennells, CBE, to give her all the titles she had at the beginning of the year, was and is an ordained vicar who held a responsible post in the Diocese of St Albans, and was on a three-person shortlist to be Bishop of London in 2017 with a corresponding seat in the House of Lords.

She was, and to a degree remains, a fully-fledged member of the English Establishment.

As is now well-known, the Reverend Vennells presided over the latter stages of the Post Office’s ultimately failed two-decades-long defence of its faulty Horizon computer system. On her and her predecessors’ watches, hundreds of sub-postmasters and -postmistresses, contractors rather than employees of the Post Office, were falsely convicted of theft or false accounting due to bugs in Horizon that erroneously reported that money was missing. The security of these systems was also compromised by the undocumented ability of Fujitsu technicians to access secure databases and alter financial data. Hundreds more sub-postmasters and -postmistresses probably had to endure financial distress as they faced handing over money they didn’t really owe or face prosecution, all due to known software errors that were deliberately concealed from them. This appropriated cash contributed to the return to profitability that happened on the Reverend Vennells’ watch.

The entire machinery of investigation and prosecution was in-house. Investigators of the state-owned company’s Security Team (ST), in effect a private police force, would go into the premises and houses of sub-postmasters and -postmistresses not to discover the truth, but to establish guilt even if it was not there. They would lie that the person was the only person complaining about Horizon faults, and would deny the existence of bugs, as they seem to have been instructed to do. They would threaten their victims and give a choice of pleading guilty to False Accounting or be prosecuted for Theft, as if the latter was worse. Both are actually offences of the same gravity in under the Theft Act. The victims were probably lulled by the impression that accounting issues do not seem as bad as stealing. Some ST investigators signed statements to the criminal courts that they did not make, as ST investigator Stephen Bradshaw admitted at the ongoing statutory inquiry; an inquiry that had to be called once convictions started to be quashed en masse.

While it is not clear if Mr Bradshaw of the ST was wearing a Hugo Boss suit at his inquiry appearance, he somewhat justified his conduct in a manner similar to stating that he was only obeying orders.

Prosecutions were also handled privately by the Post Office, who mainly employed the firm of Cartwright-King instead of handing files over to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), although the CPS did also mount prosecutions. Cartwright-King seemed to have had no prior experience of prosecuting cases, advertising themselves as specialists in defence, and also seemed for a while to have no knowledge of the ongoing responsibilities of prosecutors to ensure that convictions remained safe. The original firm went bust in 2020 and the current firm with the same name bears no relation to it.

By the time Reverend Vennells became Chief Executive Officer of the Post Office, there were strong rumblings by some journalists and the specialist computer press that all was not well with Horizon software. In fact the Post Office had actually lost a number of court cases in which the unreliability of Horizon software was successfully used by the defence. This was denied by the Reverend Vennells at a meeting with MPs shortly after her promotion to CEO in 2012.

At this time the Post Office needed a Mary Poppins to sort things out. Instead the Post Office got a Lady Macbeth.

The Reverend Vennells neither preached what she actually practised, nor did she actually practise what she preached.

On Sundays she would be Reverend Jekyll. The rest of the week she was Ms Hyde. 

On her watch the Post Office moved from whitewash and cover-up to cover-up and damage limitation. The whitewash was the infamous ‘Ismay Report’, a document used by the Post Office to defend the reliability of Horizon to all-comers. The author, Rod Ismay, recently appeared at the statutory public inquiry and had to be warned against self-incrimination before he was cross-examined by the inquiry’s counsel.

The cover-up was facilitated by the investigations and prosecutions being conducted in-house with limited external scrutiny when things were wrong. The Post Office was (and still remains) a law unto itself.

Damage limitation only started when the Post Office received the ‘Clarke Advice’, that their expert witness in successful convictions, Gareth Jenkins, could not be relied on for independence and impartial evidence in past or future cases. Jenkins was the lead developer of Horizon, his position at Fujitsu was that of ‘Distinguished Engineer’ (I kid ye not). Jenkins was in the pay of Fujitsu, and Fujitsu was in the pay of the Post Office, and this seems to have informed his conduct in court. 

There was a second Clarke Advice warning against the destruction of documents that led to new rules inside the Post Office about what could be recorded.  But by the end of 2013, a pause in prosecutions had been initiated. The board, including the Reverend Vennells, became very interested in their personal civil and possible criminal liability. That damage limitation through the assiduous use of media management resulted in it being only because of a public outcry caused by an ITV mini-series that the government has been forced to make new law quashing hundreds of convictions that Post Office insiders knew were unsafe for over a decade before.

Private Eye recently reported that the Reverend Vennells has engaged the services of top legal firm Mishcon de Reya, and speculated that she had done so to deter defamation. It has not helped her from being publicly described as a liar.

The Reverend Vennells had already been exposed as a liar in this now rather famous exchange in 2015 at a Commons Select Committee hearing looking into the Post Office’s damage limitation effort that it disguised as a “mediation scheme”.

Nadhim Zahawi: No, answer my question. Why will you not give Ian
Henderson those files?
Paula Vennells: As far as I am aware, Mr Zahawi, we have shared whatever
information was appropriate on every single individual.
Nadhim Zahawi: That is not what Ian Henderson is saying.
Paula Vennells: It is the first time, personally, that I have heard that. I am happy to
go away and have a look.
Nadhim Zahawi: He has said that under no circumstances could he be given
those files. That is what you have just told me. Is that right?
Ian Henderson: We have not been given those files.
Nadhim Zahawi: You have been told by Paula’s organisation that under no
circumstances could you be given those files. Is that right or wrong?
Paula Vennells: Who told you that, Ian?
Ian Henderson: It came up at one of the working group meetings, at which you and I
were present.

Perhaps this dishonesty was not commented on by the Select Committee, as the people on the Select Committee were only politicians.

Lying is a breach of the 10 Commandments in that “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”.

So, let’s see what other commandments the Revered Vennells has broken as well as which of the Seven Sins she has committed through her leadership of the Post Office.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me: The Reverend Vennells prioritised the well-being of the Post Office and promoted the reliability of Horizon without considering the tragic consequences of bugs in the Horizon system. The same Select Committee hearing makes this quite clear:

Nadhim Zahawi: You are the chief executive, so the buck stops with you.
Paula Vennells: It does stop with me. Also, therefore, as chief executive, I am
responsible for the reputation of and what happens for the Post Office.

Thou shalt not steal: While the Reverend Vennells did not directly indulge in theft, as also did not the victims of the bugs in the Horizon system, the Post Office did dishonestly take money from those victims. The Reverend Vennells did indirectly benefit from this theft through bonuses and other rewards for driving the Post Office back to profitability on the back of the Horizon system wrongfully clawing money from its users in sub-Post Offices.

Thou shalt not kill: Like with theft, the Reverend Vennells did not personally kill anyone. But the false accusations of theft against victims of the bugs in the Horizon system led to at least four suicides. The statutory inquiry heard how the Reverend Vennells was copied in to the news that an accused sub-postmaster had made an ultimately successful suicide attempt. The priority for the Post Office on hearing the news was to hire a media lawyer. There is a direct line from the known bugs in the Horizon system, through to the Post Office under the Revered Vennells, to the falsely accused killing himself.

And on to the Seven Sins:

Pride: Classed as the worst sin of all, the Reverend Vennells prioritised the Post Office and her position in it above facts she found to be inconvenient. She is on record as demanding via email the reasons as to how she may be able to state to the 2015 Select Committee that Fujitsu technicians were unable to access remotely Horizon systems operating in sun Post Offices, despite the fact that this was known:

Dear both, your help please in answers and phrasing those answers, in prep for the [Select Committee]:

1) ‘is it possible to access the system remotely? We are told it is. What is the true answer?  I hope it is that we know this is not possible and that we are able to explain why that is.  I need to say no it is not possible and that we are sure of this because of xxx and that we know this because we have had the system assured.

The Reverend Vennells also approved the official Post Office line that there were “no systemic issues with the Horizon computer system”. This was a bluff. If there were “systemic” issues, then this would have affected not hundreds of sub-Post Offices, but thousands. The Post Office may have been thrust into a highly public existential crisis instead of the rather private one that occurred. Yes, there were no systemic issues, but there were still specific issues, which were watered down on the Reverend Vennells’ personal instructions to describe ‘bugs’, a technical term in the computer industry, as ‘anomalies’, a more meaningless general term. On this, the Post Office successfully kept away major media scrutiny for almost two decades.

Avarice: The Reverend Vennells motivation in all that went on was personal advancement, and most probably the rewards of her position, as well as the status this conferred on her. Despite all that had gone on at the Post Office on her watch, she still put herself forward for consideration to be a Bishop. She also received a handsome salary and bonuses for her work and will no doubt benefit from an impressive pension. There is no indication that the Reverend Vennells will be donating any of her earnings to charity or performing a Profumo-like penance.

Wrath: After the Post Office implemented a faulty computer system that could not tell the difference between genuine fraud and program error, the Reverend Vennells presided over the continuation of a campaign of terror and persecution of numerous innocent people rather than face the truth. It may well be Horizon’s unreliability in matters financial had the potential to turn sub-Post Offices into free cash machines, of which the unscrupulous would have taken advantage. The terror and persecutions became existential necessities for the Post Office. It took legal advice provided in 2013 that she could be personally liable for miscarriages of justice, and also that such miscarriages had taken place, before the prosecutions on her watch came to an end, but not before she realised she could face civil actions and possibly jail.

Sloth: This does not just refer to laziness as is popularly interpreted, but also an indifference to duties and obligations. In mounting private prosecutions, the Post Office had an ongoing responsibility to maintain the safety of those prosecutions, as well as the obvious responsibility for the well-being of those contracted to work for the Post Office. On the Reverend Vennells’ watch, these responsibilities was deliberately ignored. The mediation scheme that she set up made no attempt to quash convictions that had resulted from private prosecutions and the Post Office stated in writing to the Select Committee “Post Office is under an absolute duty to disclose any evidence that might undermine a prosecution case or support the case of a defendant. It takes its responsibilities in this regard very seriously and Post Office’s investigations have been carried out with this important duty firmly in mind.” The second sentence can now be stated to be untrue, and the first sentence describes what should have been done, but wasn’t, certainly not on the Reverend Vennells’ watch.

For all this, the Revered Vennells is worse than Eichmann, but is not directly comparable. Eichmann, confined to the relatively low rank of Lt-Colonel (Obersturmbannführer in the Nazis’ ridiculous nomenclature) as he was not a Great War veteran, is what you get from living in a Nazi regime, an excuse of his that found no favour in an Israeli court. The Reverend Vennells can hardly claim to be a victim of deterministic forces or groupthink. Her job as CEO was to challenge, scrutinise, and oversee the functions of executives and managers. Even in a siloed organisation, she was meant to have access to all points of information.

No, the Reverend Vennells more closely resembles one or more senior apparatchiks who formed part of the class known as the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union who were aware of serious design faults in the RBMK nuclear reactor, and when these started to be reported, hushed them up as a state secret, as well as approving the consequent undertraining of the reactor operators so they would be oblivious to the dangers, such as the reactor temporarily surging when an emergency shutdown was initiated due to the graphite tips on the reactor control rods. 

So when these poor operators removed every single safety control to complete a late-running test that was demanded by other apparatchiks, and then were forced to initiate a rapid shutdown when things started to go wrong, they did not know they were going to cause one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters. After the thermal and hydrogen explosions devastated Reactor 4 at Chernobyl, local apparatchiks refused to believe the top had blown off the reactor exposing the core to the world. They believed the radiation was minimal because their meters were displaying the maximum possible reading and they therefore believed that this was the actual level of radioactivity and no more. A more sensitive meter burnt out its sensitive sensors and they blamed this on shoddy workmanship. 

It was only when military-grade equipment was used that the full horror was exposed.

Up until then, almost everyone in authority believed the lie, because it was more reassuring. Reassuring lies propagated by the Reverend Vennells and others about dodgy technology at the Post Office sent hundreds to prison, and impoverished countless more.

So, what will happen to the Reverend Paula Vennells? At the time of writing, she has yet to appear that the inquiry but she will do so in the next few days. There are two types of people who are now appearing at the inquiry, those advised of the right against self-incrimination (called ‘taking the fifth’ in the USA) by the chairman Sir Wyn Williams, and those that are not. The Reverend Paula Vennells will probably fall into the first category. Having watched those warned people give evidence, none of them have fallen back on asserting that right. Instead, they have all claimed ignorance, incompetence or forgetfulness, in the reasonable belief that it is better to look like an idiot in public than a villain. This has gone to ludicrous lengths such as in the case of the Post Office’s former chief criminal solicitor Jarnail Singh when he denied seeing a document that could have aided a defendant just before the trial started.

So the pregnant Seema Misra was convicted and had to give birth in jail.

So it is unlikely that the Reverend Vennells will confess all and ask us to forgive her trespasses. Her engagement of top lawyers probably has less to do with defamation, and more to do with keeping her out of jail or being the defendant in one or more civil actions. In the USA the perpetrators of white-collar crimes, such as rogue accountants, have been indicted successfully on the basis of what they knew, but also what they should have known. It is not clear if this legal test exists in the UK.

It is probable that the Reverend Vennells will argue that despite her position, she could only act based on the information supplied by subordinates, and that she had to weigh up this information to make decisions and that she made mistakes, bad mistakes, catastrophic mistakes, but mistakes nonetheless. Lord Arbuthnot, who as MP and peer has been at the forefront in Westminster over the scandal stated “The hallmark of Paula Vennells’ time as CEO was that she was willing to accept appalling advice from people in her management and legal teams. The consequences of this were far-reaching for the Post Office and devastating for the sub postmasters”. The Reverend Vennells could place a lot of reliance on this to get off the hook.

The Reverend Vennells might state that the portion of the company that ran prosecutions did not know about the bugs, and the portion of the company that knew about the bugs did not alert the prosecutors for one reason or another, and that none of them alerted her. She might argue that there is a cabal other than her that actually ran the company, and that she was just a figurehead. She might resort to the Rimmer Defence:

While the Reverend Paula Vennells has been the target of public disgrace from the moment the Post Office lost the case mounted by Mr Bates and others back in 2019, this has been slow to affect her. She announced her intention to leave the Post Office in 2018, perhaps she knew (or should have known?) that the Post Office were going to lose, despite fighting tooth and nail in the courts to the extent of trying to disqualify the trial judge, and spending over £100 Million of taxpayers money in the failed attempt to protect the reputation of the Post Office. 

Vicar’s daughter Theresa May’s government awarded the Reverend Paula Vennells a CBE in the New Year’s Honours, and she cemented her establishment credentials by moving onto the board of numerous public and private organisations. The loss of the civil case in 2019 did not affect her much, but the tide slowly started to turn when a number of people convicted on Post Office evidence had their convictions quashed in the High Court in 2020 and 2021. Now she was gone, the Post Office stopped opposing appeals based on its own evidence, evidence that had been supported by the Reverend Vennells for years. To prevent further appeals, Parliament is to pass the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act that automatically quashes any Horizon-linked conviction. The cost to the taxpayer of the Horizon scandal is predicted to exceed £1 Billion. The current operating profit of the Post Office is one-twentieth of this, and the business has reported a statutory loss. The Reverend Vennells’ alleged achievement in returning the Post Office to profitability seems in tatters. She did not earn her salary.

The disengagement by the Reverend Vennells from the trappings of an establishment that previously embraced her as one of the English nomenklatura has been slow, considering the dramatic nature of her failings. It is only in early 2020 that she decided to step away from advising the Cabinet Office, perhaps in anticipation of the first round of convictions being quashed later in the year. She announced in December 2020 that she would stand down from being the chair of an NHS healthcare trust six months after the Care Quality Commission responded to concerns that she was not a fit and proper person to hold the role and also at around the time convictions started being quashed. 

After 39 convictions were quashed in early 2021, the Reverend Vennells announced she would be stepping back from her duties as associate minister. This was also the trigger for her to abandon a brace of non-executive directorships and some other positions. But she still held on to her CBE. This was stripped from her this year for “bringing the honours system into disrepute” in the aftermath of the ITV miniseries that brought her actions to the viewing public, and it was only the consequent outcry that caused this. There are no good reasons why it took a TV drama for her to lose her honour when documentaries on the miscarriages of justice had been regularly broadcast for years. Something should have happened some time between 2020 and the end of 2023.

But what about Christianity, and the post of vicar in the Church of England? Have they not also been brought into disrepute? It is not possible to defrock a vicar this long after the actions requiring defrocking unless there is special dispensation, which is probably normally used when the ordained have turned out to be paedophiles years later. The Diocese of St Albans will not confirm whether or not any complaints regarding the Reverend Vennells’ continued status in the church have been received. The canon law of the Church of England states that “No person who has been admitted to the order of bishop, priest, or deacon can ever be divested of the character of his order…”. The Clergy Discipline Measure 2003 covers the range of actions including judicial processes with penalties such as prohibition from exercising functions, removal from office, revocation of licence, injunctions, or just a rebuke. So, the Reverend Vennells after any proceedings will still be entitled to call herself the Reverend Vennells, even if she is banned from acting like a reverend.

But in the Reverend Vennells there is now a better example of the banality of evil, a more plausible one than Eichmann because the evil acts didn’t happen in a dictatorship under wartime conditions, but in our modern free and open society run on Judaeo-Christian principles in an organisation providing a simple counter service for various products found uneconomic for the private sector to provide. A person, ordained by the church, reading reports, sending emails, attending committees, making decisions, holding meetings, all the while quietly aware of the terror being inflicted on innocents, day after day, month after month, year after year, and then doing all she could to cover it up, such as making the Post Office use the vague terms and misdirecting attention by using the word “systemic” in a blanket denial, all while officiating out at Hertfordshire churches every Sunday. 

The objective was clearly never to make the problem go away, but to prolong the time needed to expose it until the perpetrators could move on. The Reverend Vennells and others succeeded in kicking the can down the road for a decade earning fat pay-packets and building up large pension pots while doing so, and maybe that was the collective motivation; that ill-earned money would never be clawed back unless there is an expensive, complex, and unprecedented court case. 

It’s difficult to describe the Reverend Vennells as a Christian, especially as she seems to have sold her soul to a declining high street business with a sideline in persecution. Her mission was not salvation of her flock but damnation of the people who paid her wages with their work. She has yet to apologise for her part in the misery, lest such an admission be used in the courts, only to date being sorry for the suffering that was endured while not actually admitting her leading part in it all.

When at the Post Office, the Reverend Vennells worked out of the headquarters near the Old Street Northern Line tube station. It does seem that while she worked there and for some time before and a little afterwards, Christ got off at Moorgate.

Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.