Paula Vennells’ hollow apology epitomises a rotten culture of cover-ups

If the King gave out honours on the basis of acting skills alone then surely Paula Vennells would be handed back her CBE in a heartbeat. Or perhaps an Oscar would be more appropriate after the disgraced former Post Office boss was hauled in front of the Horizon IT inquiry for a grilling lasting three days.

Her appearance was always going to be a tense affair – furious sub-postmasters had waited years for this, and more than 100 campaigners had turned up to watch her interrogation – but Vennells laid it on so thick at times, one wondered if she’d been attending amateur dramatics night classes at the local village hall in preparation.

You could imagine a gaggle of handsomely paid advisers on the side of the stage wincing as Vennells broke down repeatedly in an apparent display of true remorse at her part in one of the worst miscarriages of justice in modern history.

“Oh god, not again Paula. No one’s going to fall for this. We agreed once would be enough,” is how a seasoned public relations guru would probably have reacted to this uncomfortable spectacle.

The overwhelming conclusion after watching Vennells’ wholly unconvincing performance is that these were carefully crafted crocodile tears straight out of acting school. “Quite well-rehearsed… a PR apology,” was how former sub-postmaster Mark Kelly dismissed Vennells’ attempts at atonement.

There’s an argument that there is nothing Vennells could have said to satisfy some of those that were wrongly convicted. The sense of injustice and anger that many rightly still feel at what happened, particularly given the inescapable impression of an establishment cover-up must feel overwhelming at times.

But at the very least she needed to come across as authentic. Instead, this was someone who seemed content to apologise as long as she didn’t incriminate herself. It’s a tactic we see time and again these days from public figures: hollow apologies for “what happened” or if people are upset, offended and angry, but not for their part in it. This is what happens when lawyers and communications specialists become too involved in important inquiries.

But the second day of Vennells’ evidence revealed an organisation that has long been obsessed with managing its public image and risk avoidance, to the extent that it came at the expense of doing what was right for the accused postmasters.

A trusted lieutenant from the Post Office PR department advised her not to review historical cases involving Horizon cases because it would be “front page news”. There was also a meeting she claims not to have known about where lawyers dismissed the possibility of commissioning an independent report on the basis that it would be the “highest” risk.

Her case has hardly been helped by the concerns of former Royal Mail boss Dame Moya Greene, revealed in a series of damning texts to the inquiry in which Dame Moya suggests “there was some conspiracy” as Vennells put it to the inquiry.

“I don’t know what to say. I think you knew,” Dame Moya said. Vennells replies “that isn’t the case,” yet to lose the backing of someone who worked alongside her for years at the most senior level is a serious blow.

Even if this was genuine sorrow on display from Vennells, then there are two points to make. Firstly, her tears have come far too late to be in any way meaningful or to even get close to undoing the suffering that hundreds of former Post Office workers experienced.

As Kelly, a sub-postmaster in Swansea from 2003 to 2006, asked: “All these years she could have made an apology like that. Why did she have to wait until today?”

Perhaps Suzanne Sercombe, partner of campaigning national hero Alan Bates, sums it up best: “It’s meaningless because she did not do anything in years gone past when she should have done something. It’s like, ‘Sorry I got found out’.”

The second is that if her tears were genuine then it seems more likely that they were for herself, not the many victims of this nightmarish wrongdoing, many of whom sadly did not live to see the truth come to light.

Britain’s national institutions are rightly admired around the world but this, and the infected blood scandal, are an indelible stain that no amount of belated, half-hearted apologies can ever put right.

It all points to a deeper and more troubling issue at the heart of the British state and how it is run. Too often people like Vennells, who build careers in public service over decades, become totally unaccountable. This enables genuine travesties of justice such as these to first go uncovered, and then take a lifetime to be properly investigated.

Part of the problem is that those tasked with scrutinising the system are public servants too. It’s a culture where everyone is deemed to be acting with the best intentions so it is assumed mistakes were made in good faith by people who are essentially honest and decent.

This is how cover-ups happen. Too many people – including those with the power to step in – convince themselves that it would be unfair to punish someone who got it wrong but did so with everyone’s best interests at heart.

They don’t think of themselves as having messed up. They believe they were doing the right thing in difficult circumstances. In the Post Office’s case, the priority was protecting the interests of the company at the cost of accountability.

These grave errors occur because there is no proper external or independent oversight, which is why there is a lot to learn from the private sector. It’s not that mistakes aren’t made, or that cover-ups don’t happen – they do. But they tend to be quickly unearthed. Mistakes show up in the share price and investors are quick to punish if things go badly wrong.

Until these fundamental shortcomings in the public sector are addressed, scandals will keep occurring.