The Post Office Scandal | The Barrister Who Broke the Case Open | 4

Alice and Matt sit down with Paul Marshall, the barrister who helped reveal the truth behind the Horizon scandal - and nearly paid the price for it himself. He tells us how he uncovered an explosive legal opinion that exposed misleading evidence, discredited a key witness and helped overturn dozens of wrongful convictions. This episode contains reference to a suicide. If you're going through a tough time, please call Samaritans from within the UK on 116 123 or email [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alice Levine?

  Hello. A quick note before we start. The following episode does cover some serious topics, including a description of a suicide attempt. If you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health, please see the episode notes for information about support services.

• 0:17Alice Levine?

  From Audible Originals, I'm Alice Levine.

• 0:20Matt Forde?

  And I'm Matt Ford.

• 0:21Alice Levine?

  And this is British Scandal.

• 0:36Alice Levine?

  Okay, Matt, we're at the end of one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in British history, the Post Office scandal. How are you feeling?

• 0:44Matt Forde?

  I feel so many different things. I still feel livid on behalf of the sub-postmasters. I still feel sad about it, mainly just disbelief.

• 0:52Alice Levine?

  Yeah, it's really confusing. On the surface, it looked like a victory. There were convictions overturned, names cleared, and of course, the sub-postmasters were finally believed.

• 1:01Matt Forde?

  Yeah, but scratch that surface and it's still grim because the people who suffered lost everything, and the biggest organisations involved are still standing. It feels like David beats Goliath, and then Goliath walks off into the sunset with a full wallet.

• 1:14Alice Levine?

  Yes, and to really stretch this analogy to its limits, David is the sub-postmasters, but David needed a catapult to help beat Goliath.

• 1:25Matt Forde?

  Right, and I think we're stretching it too far.

• 1:27Alice Levine?

  It's not good, is it? Basically, to take on an institution like the Post Office, backed by the state with serious money, the respect of the nation, decades of authority, you need someone in your corner who's pretty fearless, someone that knows the law inside out.

• 1:44Matt Forde?

  And can use a catapult.

• 1:45Alice Levine?

  And ideally can use a catapult metaphorically. Our guest today is the barrister who stood up in court for wrongly convicted sub-postmasters and who revealed the clerk advice, which we will hear more about.

• 1:57Matt Forde?

  Yeah, that's the internal legal document. Warning: that, spoiler alert, Post Office evidence and Horizon itself might not be reliable.

• 2:05Alice Levine?

  We've got the very impressive Paul Marshall after this.

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• 3:21Alice Levine?

  Now, Paul, I don't want to embarrass you, particularly at the beginning of an interview, but you've been described as one of the most formidable minds in contract and financial law. How do you feel about that?

• 3:32Speaker 04

  It was complete nonsense.

• 3:35Speaker 04

  I do know a bit of law. I know a bit of contract law. I've been doing law a long time and I suppose I have the personal and professional vanity to think that my services may be, dare I say, valuable, which is what got me involved in this entire story in the first place. So in terms of knowing a bit of law, yes, I do. I'm not a criminal lawyer, but I thought that my legal knowledge and experience might be helpful to these poor people and in the event, it has proved to be the case.

• 4:08Matt Forde?

  So when did you first hear of the post office trials? And did you get in contact with the victims yourself?

• 4:13Speaker 04

  I was reading Mr. Justice Fraser's judgment in the Horizon Issues trial and I wrote an article about it because I've been for a long time, very interested in the way in which public institutions and also large corporations are able to defeat the justice system. And as a result of that, somebody got in contact with me and said, well, would you like to meet some of the victims? And having been introduced to... Several. I offered my services to those people Janet Skinner, Seema Misra, and Tracy Felstead, and said that I thought I could help them get their convictions quashed. And I had long discussions with them, including with Tracy Felstead.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  She was prosecuted by the post office for theft of, I think, about ten or eleven thousand pounds. I heard that she'd been imprisoned in Holloway, which is the largest women's prison facility in Europe. When I asked her about the compensation that she had ultimately received, she was initially very reluctant to tell me how much of that fifty-seven million pound settlement she'd received. But I pressed her, and she said, well, look, I'll tell you, I got seventeen thousand pounds. She was imprisoned at the age of nineteen and served a number of months in prison. Whilst in prison, she encountered a fellow inmate hanged and has never recovered from it.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  And that then has now deeply affected me. And I said to her, I will do anything to assist you, and I will not charge you.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  And that was my motivation, really, with all those three clients. Their lives have been absolutely devastated. Tracy has never recovered from that. In the Court of Appeal in 2020, when I was instructed on her behalf, she, coming up to that hearing, she had a complete physiological neurological collapse and was admitted to hospital. It was thought that she had had a stroke. In fact, the reality is that she simply couldn't cope with the stress of approaching what was going to be the end of effectively twenty years

• 6:38Speaker 04

  of a period in which she'd been subject to a miscarriage of justice and an unlawfully obtained conviction. And to put it in context, since starting to represent her in 2020, she finds it very difficult to give instructions because she finds it so stressful that she frequently breaks down.

• 6:59Alice Levine?

  Was there a moment when the scale and severity of the post office scandal unfolded in front of your eyes?

• 7:04Speaker 04

  That's a very interesting question. I quite early on started to think you have an enormous number of prosecutions, and in this case, we've got 42 appeals going to the Court of Appeal essentially on the same thing, which is all these people, all these former postmasters or employees of the post office, had been prosecuted. And in every case, the grounds of appeal substantially was that the evidence relied on was both complete and unreliable. And it doesn't really require the particular insight or ingenuity to recognise that if you've got a lot of things going wrong in the same way over a long period of time, there's some wider problem.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  And I early formed the view that the post office was effectively what can be called a bad faith prosecutor. It wasn't playing by the rules. And I was completely convinced of this.

• 8:03Alice Levine?

  Was there a specific moment where that moved from suspicion to certainty, where you thought, this is huge, this is systemic?

• 8:10Speaker 04

  October 2020, I was sitting in my study late at night and I was reading what's called late disclosure. That's the obligation on a party to disclose documents in their possession which are adverse to their case, i.e. help the other side. And I suddenly came across an entry which showed that the post office had been advised by an independent firm of solicitors in 2013 about evidence given by one particular individual, namely a Mr Gareth Jenkins, co-architect of the Horizon system and was employed by Fujitsu. And he had given evidence at the trial of Mrs Seema Misra, who was convicted of theft in 2010.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  And the cause for the notification was concern about the fullness of disclosure that the post office had given in relation to his evidence. And much to my astonishment, amongst the documents disclosed was something which is now known as the Clark Advice. It's possibly the most important, most notorious document in the entire scandal.

• 9:17Alice Levine?

  For people who've never heard of it, what did the Clark Advice actually say?

• 9:22Speaker 04

  The Clark advice was a legal opinion given by Mr Simon Clark, who's a barrister, in which he had been asked by the post office to advise them on evidence that Mr Jenkins had given in post office prosecutions. And Mr Clark's advice to the post office was, no doubt, to the considerable dismay of the post office, that Mr Jenkins had given incomplete, unreliable and misleading evidence to the court in every one of those five cases that he'd looked at. The consequence of that was that Mr Jenkins was completely discredited as an expert witness. But more importantly, as a result of his unreliable and incomplete

• 10:04Speaker 04

  evidence given to the court, he had put the post office itself in breach of its duty owed to the court. Now, that, I suspect, must have been a seismic event for the post office.

• 10:17Matt Forde?

  If their star technical witness was unreliable, surely that affects everything? So how did that change the prosecutions?

• 10:23Speaker 04

  All the defendants and their legal teams, their solicitors and barristers, have basically taken the view that if this is Mr Jenkins and he's an architect of the Horizon system and he's employed by Fujitsu as an expert, an architect of the Horizon system, and he knows it in effect, back to front and A to Z, what's the point of us trying to challenge that evidence? And what happened, of course, is that people pleaded guilty in the face of his witness statements, simply because they didn't have anything better to offer to the court, which could, as it were, challenge or undermine his evidence. The reason for that is that the post office and Fujitsu, in all cases, failed to give proper disclosure

• 11:03Speaker 04

  of the problems about which they knew with the Horizon system, which they knew about from the very beginning, and the kind of problems that postmasters had been experiencing, which were, in short, balancing errors, cash balancing errors at their Horizon terminals, at their branch post offices. The post office knew that those existed, Fujitsu knew that those existed, right from the very get-go, when the Horizon system was rolled out to 17,000 branches nationwide. And this makes it the scandal that it is. What they were concerned to do is to create the illusion that Horizon was reliable when they knew that it was not.

• 11:43Alice Levine?

  What was the problem with remote access in this case?

• 11:47Speaker 04

  Remote access is a very, very important subject. When the post office took over the Horizon system in 1999 at its 17,000 branches, the post office and Fujitsu knew and agreed that there would be cash account discrepancies experienced at branch accounts because, surprisingly enough, there were bugs in the Horizon system which couldn't be fixed, which had a propensity to cause cash account discrepancies. Fujitsu said, well, we can't resolve this problem without a rewrite of the software, so we're just going to have to live with it. And when we have cash account discrepancies, they'll have to be corrected, and Fujitsu will correct them.

• 12:32Speaker 04

  Now, what that meant was that the technical engineers in Fujitsu at their head office had the capacity to edit and amend transactions at branch accounts at their own headquarters when there were problems. And this it did regularly. And not only did it do it regularly, it didn't keep records of what it was doing. And this emerged in 2019 in the evidence of Mr Richard Roll. And he gave evidence and he said, yes, of course we did it. We were doing it all the time because there were so many problems with Horizon bugs and cash account discrepancies that we were constantly having to correct these accounts. And once that evidence was given in 2019, the post office capitulated on it.

• 13:15Matt Forde?

  And if that had been revealed at the time of any of the prosecutions, it could have completely undermined the case.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  But in 2013, that same issue had been raised and publicly it had been raised by the BBC in a panorama programme called Trouble at Post Office. And the BBC had flagged that there was the issue of the possibility of Fujitsu editing and amending branch post office accounts. And the post office's response to this, no, it was not possible. And that was a denial that it persisted in, which was a lie, between 2015 and 2019. Now, the reason it's so important is if Fujitsu not only had the power, but exercised the power to amend and edit branch accounts from the get-go in 1999.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  Had that fact been revealed in any single post office prosecution, it would have undermined the prosecution.

• 14:18Alice Levine?

  All of the people that were accused of wrongdoing had their sense of their own innocence undermined by this concrete fact, or supposed concrete fact, that the computers were infallible. To say they were gaslit doesn't really do justice to what was happening to them.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  This is gaslighting on an absolutely epic scale. And the post office's mendacity, in a sense, is even worse than that because at Mrs Misra's trial in 2010, she was saying, well, look, I've got a problem. My accounts don't balance. I don't know why, but they don't balance. And the prosecutor's response to that was, if she had a problem, she'd be able to identify the problem and tell us what it is. And of course, we're here to help, and we want to help her. But she can't tell us what the problem is. She hasn't got a problem. And that's the sort of Alice in Wonderland character of this. The other aspect of it, which is really terrible, is that the post office investigators and prosecutors habitually and routinely told individual postmasters that they were the only ones experiencing

• 15:19Speaker 04

  the kind of problems and difficulties that they alleged they experienced at their branch. And that was frankly just a damned lie. And it was known to be false.

• 15:29Matt Forde?

  So they were isolated on purpose?

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Isolating individuals in circumstances of this kind is a very powerful and effective strategy. And one of the great claims that Alan Bates has to honour is that he brought all the postmasters together and put them in one room. They were suddenly astonished to find that they weren't alone. And it was that that gave the coherence and strength to the group litigation, that was the only way. In which the post office as a kind of quasi state institution was capable of being taken on by the postmasters.

• 16:14Alice Levine?

  So what you've been saying is this isn't just about the post office, we're talking about the court system too.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  So in a sense, the post office scandal is not only a scandal about the conduct of the post office, it's also a scandal about the failure of the justice system. Because while these individuals were isolated and individual, the courts basically took the view, well, the post office is the prosecutor of the claimant in civil proceedings, you know, it's a respectable, proper organisation, it has very shiny files and smart lawyers. And who are these people who are saying that they didn't take the money? And at the moment, there is not the slightest institutional interest in examining why the courts and why the legal system failed so terribly and with such grievous catastrophic

• 17:03Speaker 04

  consequences for those concerned.

• 17:06Matt Forde?

  Speaking of the legal system, you mentioned the Clark advice being almost like a smoking gun and you got in trouble for sharing it. But why are you in trouble for sharing something that was part of disclosure?

• 17:16Speaker 04

  Nothing in this story is as simple as that. When I received the Clark advice, the night before the Court of Appeal hearing in November 2020, I provided a copy of that advice to the Metropolitan Police Officer and I said, you may be very interested to see this. And it was exhibited, that is attached to our written submissions for the next day in the Court of Appeal. The Metropolitan Police sent a copy of my email with that advice attached to it to the Court of Appeal. The Court of Appeal read this document out in open court and they said to the post office's leading counsel, a fellow called Brian Altman, this is what we've received from the Metropolitan

• 17:59Speaker 04

  Police, more or less said, well, what do you say about that, Mr Altman? And Mr Altman said to the Court of Appeal, well, this may very well be a contempt of court.

• 18:08Alice Levine?

  And how bad is this, from slapped wrist to prison time?

• 18:13Speaker 04

  Well, contempt of court is quite a serious thing. You could be imprisoned for up to two years. Providing a copy of a very important document to the Metropolitan Police who are undertaking investigation is quite difficult, so far as I can see, to construe that as interfering with the course of justice. Unfortunately, things happen in court quite often in a way that is a little bit unpredictable. And judges are human beings, like all the rest of us. And they have a propensity, when, as it were, provoked, to react in a sort of spasm fashion. And raising contempt of court with the Court of Appeal with a document that seems important, which has attached to those submissions or those comments, very potentially severe

• 18:59Speaker 04

  legal consequences. It's really like sort of throwing a little bit of fillet steak into a bath full of sharks. It causes great excitement. And the Court of Appeal got very excited about this. And effectively, the scene was set for a threat against me for contempt of court, which lasted for about six to eight months, I think. It was eventually lifted immediately following the Court of Appeal's judgment in the substantive appeals, but not before I had to sort of abase myself and apologise. The interesting legal aspect to this is that if you've been convicted and your life blighted by a conviction for theft for 18 years on the basis of evidence given to the

• 19:40Speaker 04

  court about the Horizon system, and then you know that the person who was the principal witness to attest the reliability of that system, when in truth it's known not to be reliable, i.e. it's riddled with bugs and software problems. If you know that as a convicted person, and then you have the document, referring it to the Metropolitan Police, as a reflex reaction by the Court of Appeal, treat it as a potential contempt of court. Put in those terms, it's utterly absurd. Well, it was absurd.

• 20:17Alice Levine?

  You say it was absurd. Did it also erode your faith in the system?

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Not particularly, because I didn't have particularly great faith in the system to start with. I think the Court of Appeal was confronted, no doubt, intentionally by the Post Offices Council with circumstances that they considered were of great gravity. That's how it was presented. And I was given about five minutes' notice of this before the hearing by council for the Post Office. But it was intended, no doubt, I think, to provoke the response and reaction that it did. It almost had the result of causing me not only to withdraw from the appeals, but also to resign from the bar in protest, in part about the treatment of my learner junior

• 21:05Speaker 04

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• 22:48Matt Forde?

  In the end, you win the appeal. In 2021, the court quashed the convictions of 39 out of 42 of the appeals. What did that victory feel like?

• 22:56Speaker 04

  Very satisfying. There is a lot of gamesmanship in law and legal proceedings. And, as is perfectly apparent, it's about winning and losing. It's very good to have the Court of Appeal confirm one's analysis in every single case that they granted the appeal. That's all 39 of the appeals. Not only were these individuals not given a fair trial, but they were completely exonerated. They had been improperly prosecuted. The prosecutor was a bad, if you like. You know, to express my own personal view, the post office as an institution is the closest

• 23:38Speaker 04

  that we have come in this country, to my knowledge, to a thoroughly corrupt public institution.

• 23:44Matt Forde?

  And how do you think it ended up like that? Is it just about the individual leader? So no matter who the chief executive of it was, this was gonna effectively always operate in that way?

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Very, very interesting question. No doubt, a number of sort of academic theses could be written on that. The post office is an enormously long-established, highly-regarded institution. It's one of the reasons why it all went so wrong, because postmasters, when they took over a post office branch, they thought, you know, we're joining in this huge national enterprise. In fact, the reality is, the post office is one of the longest-established investigating authorities in the world. The post office is, as it were, indulged and privileged by the courts because it was a highly reputable institution. It traded on that.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  The other and bleak side of it, if you like, the black side of it, is in effect, it was accountable to no one. Power corrupts, and the post office's institutional, internal power gave rise to institutional, systemic abuses and bad practices.

• 24:54Matt Forde?

  And so what did this power the post office held mean for individual cases?

• 24:58Speaker 04

  The post office was three things. It was the victim, it was the investigator, and it was the prosecutor. Lying at the heart of that is it pretended to be a victim, but it actually wasn't a victim. What it was doing was protecting a crap computer system and a crap business model, which was founded on that computer system. To track forward to Janet Skinner's case, she was supposed to have had a shortfall of some 50,000 at her branch, post office in 2007. Now, the post office investigator, having investigated Janet Skinner, she didn't think she'd taken any money from the post office, but she was nonetheless prosecuted for theft. She was told by her barrister that she hadn't got any evidence to counteract the post office's

• 25:42Speaker 04

  evidence, and she was advised to plead guilty on the basis that in doing so, she would avoid a prison sentence. She did so, and she received an immediate prison sentence. She was the mother of two teenage children at the time, and she didn't go home to see them. And during her entire time in prison, Janet Skinner didn't speak once to her children. When Janet was released from prison, she got herself another job, temporary job, and she was about to go and get a permanent appointment with her new employer. A colleague in her work saw her face in the newspaper and said, "Oh, there's a warrant out for your arrest.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Apparently, you haven't paid the money you're supposed to have paid when you were prosecuted." Janet Skinner went out with him to go and get the local newspaper and saw her face emblazoned in the newspaper, together with a well-known local gangster.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  She was traumatised by this and a few days later, she gave herself up to the court. And the judge said to her, well, look, you know, you haven't paid the however many thousand pounds that you were ordered to pay at the time of your prosecution when you were convicted. If you don't pay that money, you are going to go back to prison for another five years. And she had no money. She'd lost her home. She had several appearances in court. And very shortly after that, she had a complete neurological collapse. And she found that her legs didn't work, her feet had ceased to have any feeling. And she can walk. So she was admitted to hospital. She was in hospital for about five months, I think,

• 27:19Speaker 04

  with something called transverse myelitis, which is a sort of related illness to MS. And the consequence is that although she's now able to walk with difficulty, she can't walk properly, can't grip properly and hasn't worked since 2008. Well, in my view, it is impossible to conceive of a more corrupt, if you like, bent prosecuting authority than the post office as a prosecuting authority. It was institutionally corrupt. It wasn't just incompetent, it was corrupt. It was engaged in, and has been engaged in, the most extensive, long-lasting

• 28:02Speaker 04

  and destructive abuse of process that is known of in recent memory, certainly since the turn of the century and probably since the turn of the last century.

• 28:13Alice Levine?

  As you described, the devastation is by no means over. Where are things now for the victims?

• 28:18Speaker 04

  Impossibly difficult because it only needs to be stated that these appeals were granted in April of 2021. I've represented and represent, if not all, certainly most of the most seriously injured, grievously affected and afflicted victims of the post office. If I tell you that in only one case... Have I, together with my colleagues, succeeded in achieving a final settlement of their overall claim? That rather gives you the flavour of it.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  It's been five years of relentless slog, struggle, resistance, friction, obstruction, hostility and opposition from the government and the post office.

• 29:12Matt Forde?

  The post office itself was put in charge of compensating the victims. It just seems bizarre that the organisation that causes the pain is then in charge of the payouts. Why was that?

• 29:23Speaker 04

  Well, it was agreed between the parties, that is, the 550 odd claimants and the post office, that they would establish a compensation scheme. Paul Scully, who was then the minister for the post office, said, "This is very good arrangement because Herbert Smith Freehill's, well-known firm of solicitors, know a lot about it." I mean, it's completely potty.

• 29:46Alice Levine?

  Potty in what sense?

• 29:47Speaker 04

  I think I'm right in saying that it's got somewhere in the order now of some 6,000 applicants to that scheme. But the reality is that because of that sort of institutional inertia and paralysis and intellectual lack of vision and imagination, the poor victims are dying before they get compensation. That is a scandal all of its own and it's the consequence of, dare I say it, both political and also legal ineffectiveness and lack of imagination and lack of grip.

• 30:21Alice Levine?

  I wonder if you've considered what you think should happen to Paula Vennells?

• 30:25Speaker 04

  I think in all honesty, I haven't really thought about what should happen to her. I believe that institutions take their colour, character and lead from the top.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  And Paula Venables was the chief executive officer of the post office up until about 2017 when she left. I also think that contrary to her evidence in the inquiry, she didn't have an inquiring or critical mind because given the position that she was occupying, it ought to have been apparent to her by at the latest 2013 that there was a really serious problem with the post office and its conduct of prosecutions. After all, you can see this actually in her attendance before the Select Committee in February 2015, I

• 31:20Speaker 04

  think it was, when Second Sight asked for disclosure of the criminal records of those whom the post office had prosecuted. And Second Sight said they did not think that the post office had sufficient evidence in many cases to prosecute. Now, Paula Venables appeared at that inquiry and rather than engaging with the issues, her position was, well, Second Sight aren't legally qualified to consider whether there was sufficient evidence. Well, Ron Wilmington had been the head of the fraud unit at a large retail bank and there's not much that you can teach him or could have taught him about fraud investigations,

• 32:02Speaker 04

  which after all is what the post office scandal was all about and how incompetently ineptly they'd been conducted. And she basically stonewalled.

• 32:11Matt Forde?

  I was also going to ask, and it returns to a point you made earlier, that effectively to prevent this happening, not just with the post office but with any organisation, isn't the lesson that if anybody has prosecutorial powers or statutory powers, they have to face a minimum level of external regulation or scrutiny? Does the post office now currently have that?

• 32:32Speaker 04

  No, no, it doesn't. It would obviously be sensible if private prosecutors were properly regulated and had recognised standards which were independently audited. But the government received recommendations to similar effect from the Justice Committee, but the government rejected those recommendations. One of the aspects of inquiries is they're set up, they take a long time, they review a great deal, an enormous amount of evidence, in this case millions of documents. They make recommendations to Parliament, and Parliament can basically put it in the wastepaper basket if Parliament thinks fit, that means if the government thinks fit. And if you look at the public inquiries that have been undertaken over the

• 33:15Speaker 04

  last 20 years, you'll find that a tiny, tiny number of recommendations made by the chairs of the inquiries have in fact been implemented and adopted by Parliament.

• 33:27Alice Levine?

  No matter who's involved in something like this, it would be dastardly what happened, and of course tragic. But because the victims were postmasters, people who are self-selecting as being civically minded, as pillars of the community, people who deal on integrity and trust with their neighbours and friends, it just feels so much more heart-wrenching, doesn't it?

• 33:51Speaker 04

  It is, and not only that. I mean, these are people who've been vetted by the post office for their entrepreneurial skill, flair, for their integrity, for their business common sense, for their drive, their ambition, for their loyalty, for their enthusiasm for the brand, all those things which any large corporation would value very highly. Management, from board level downwards, treated its postmasters with studied contempt and disdain.

• 34:26Matt Forde?

  And many sub-postmasters come from ethnic minorities, is that right?

• 34:30Speaker 04

  For example, Seema Misra came here with her husband from India to make a new life because she thought that British values of sort of individual enterprise and fair play were values in a society where they could thrive. And in fact, she went to prison when she was convicted of theft when eight weeks pregnant with her second child. All of them were people who were embedded in their communities, highly respected, and played a vital role sometimes in facilitating relationships and all kinds of community interactions. And yet, they were all sacrificed, I'd be inclined to practically say crucified, for

• 35:14Speaker 04

  the post office's object of protecting a computer system that it knew was fatally flawed and didn't work properly. And the reason the post office did it simply was that for it to tell the truth and for it to become public knowledge that this was a system that basically didn't work, basically undermined its commercial business model and its business.

• 35:38Alice Levine?

  And that's why this scandal feels so important to have out in the open, because it was systemic failure after systemic failure.

• 35:44Speaker 04

  Indeed. My view is the best characterization of the post office scandal, it is an example of a state institution hijacking the legal system, the justice system, for a period of 20 years with complete impunity and no accountability. My view is that the people who were responsible for this, so far as they knew and they were cooperating with it and they sent people to prison, ought to go to prison themselves, including a number of the lawyers.

• 36:14Alice Levine?

  Do you still use the post office, Paul?

• 36:17Speaker 04

  You can't not.

• 36:18Alice Levine?

  Paul, thank you so much.

• 36:30Alice Levine?

  Thank you so much to Paul Marshall for joining us. Matt, what do you have for me next time, please?

• 36:35Matt Forde?

  I'll give you three fucking guesses.

• 36:38Alice Levine?

  Julie Walters?

• 36:39Matt Forde?

  Oh, come on, man. It's fucking obvious, isn't it?

• 36:42Alice Levine?

  Frank Skinner? Is this the Icelandic banks thing?

• 36:44Matt Forde?

  Oh, Alice, don't wind me up. Come on.

• 36:47Alice Levine?

  Wait, there's a premiere in scandal. Are you doing Lenny Henry?

• 36:50Matt Forde?

  Oh, Alice, come on. I'm Ozzy fucking Osbourne.

• 36:55Alice Levine?

  Oh, I hear it now. I just have to be told who it is first. Perfect, perfect. Cannot wait for this. Brutal. From Audible Originals and Samarsdat Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, The Post Office Scandal. British Scandal is hosted by me, Alice Levine. And me, Matt Ford. For Samarsdat, our series producer was Chica Ayers. Our assistant producer was Louise Mason. Our senior producers were Joe Sykes and Dashalisa Tsina. Executive producers for Audible were Theodora Leludis and Estelle Doyle.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Dr Seuss's Cat in the Hat and Fish are back for a whole lot of wonderfully whimsical fun. What happens when you switch bodies with your best friend? Discover a caveman frozen in ice? Or make an alien so angry he threatens to destroy the planet? Find out in season two of the Cat in the Hat podcast. The Cat and Fish are travelling the world in the great catastrophic cacophony cruiser, meeting genies, clown professors, cave trolls and extraordinary characters along the way. With clever wordplay, imaginative rhymes, original songs and stories celebrating curiosity, empathy and creative problem solving, every

• 38:17Speaker 02

  adventure brings something new to discover. It's a world of wonderful words, big imaginations and plenty of heart for the whole family. Listen to the Cat in the Hat.

• 38:27Speaker 06

  Podcast wherever you get your podcast. Audible subscribers can binge all 20 episodes early and ad free right now.

• 38:38Matt Forde?

  Hi, I'm Kenya Barris.

• 38:39Speaker 06

  And I'm Malcolm Gladwell. We're back for season two of our Audible original podcast, The Unusual Suspects.

• 38:45Matt Forde?

  We'll sit down with extraordinary guests from the worlds of art, film, literature, comedy, and wellness to hear from their unexpected stories of success.

• 38:52Speaker 06

  And who do we have this season? Well, we'll talk with Grammy winning artist Anderson Paak, athlete Rich Roll, portrait artist Amy Sherald, Oscar winning director Ron Howard, legendary writer David Sedaris, and many more. These conversations are more intimate than last season, wouldn't you say?

• 39:09Matt Forde?

  I would. Listen to season one of The Unusual Suspects wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for a free trial Audible to listen to season two in the Audible app or by subscribing to Apple Podcasts.