Used, Abused and Bemused...

... is my take thus far on Gareth Jenkins' testimony to the Post Office Scandal Enquiry. Today, his penultimate day of giving evidence before the enquiry, and his final day of questioning by the enquiry legal, Jason Beer; has seen Beer painstakingly, and often quite painfully, tease out Jenkins' exact rôle and place in the affair. A carefully scripted alternation of attack and gentle cajoling on Beer's behalf, evinced, by the end of the day, a picture of a man nominated and used by his company's management to be their useful fool, assigning to a technician 'political' and procedural responsibilities that he had neither the skills nor experience to fulfil. In short, a fallback scapegoat should their ultimate corporate aims fail.

A picture has emerged over the last few years of a peculiar and incestuous set of owner/client/provider relationships with roots stretching back to the days of the formation of ICL [which was to become a Fujitsu UK subsidiary], which Jenkins started working for on graduation as a mathematician in 1973. As mentioned before, ICL was largely a UK government project, and questions were being asked in The House of Lords as early as 1972, over continuing government funding for the company; which eventually became fully absorbed into Fujitsu in the 1980s. The political relations between the state and the company remain cloudy. 

On the Post Office side, we have a company whose sole shareholder is the government of the day [ie controlled from Whitehall], whose senior execs were charged with an agenda to mould the loss-making venture - as all so-called privatisations of former Crown entities or nationalised industries were/are - into a desirable prospect for full private sale. This senior management comprised a motley bunch of Post Office lifers and sundry 'high-flyers' parachuted in from outside, supported by the infernal tendrils of line management, cascade messaging and blame-shifting common to all corporate entities.

The Horizon system, in both of its incarnations, was sold by Fujitsu to PO Ltd., or POC Ltd., as it was originally, as essentially a 'Black Box'; its internal operations remaining proprietary to Fujitsu, and non-disclose-able to the client: an agency model, if you like. Messaging from client to contractor seems to have consisted of a series of demands to hear only what PO Ltd. needed to hear in order that they could placate 'The Shareholder' and facilitate a seamless sell-off of the business. Fujitsu management, for their part, needed to respond accordingly - hampered only by the uncomfortable fact that the changeover to the newer online system was, as is usual with such large-scale software rollouts, subject to numerous bugs, errors and defects; although piloting a live system in the wild, even on a restricted basis, was, and still is, just plain stupid.

This was compounded by PO Ltd's insistence to the outside world and 'The Shareholder' that everything was just tickety-boo, which it patently wasn't, with errors thrown up even by the older, legacy system covered up and innocent people bankrupted or imprisoned, or both, as a result. Internally, both Fujitsu's and PO's senior management were well aware of the issues that had led to the numerous miscarriages of justice - now infamously known - instigated by them collectively and the subject of both the current enquiry, but also of an ongoing police investigation: the cover-up emanated from that level: and blame continued right through the affair to be apportioned amongst the lower orders of both organisations.

No, I don't think that Gareth Jenkins is entirely blameless in the broader scope of the affair, as one's actions or omissions do carry consequences; but neither do I believe him to be instrumental or in any real way complicit in the larger conspiracy that obviously obtained at the time; ie. to lay blame at the feet of anyone or anything but the heads of the Hydra. I believe Jenkins to be naïve and a tad lackadaisical at worst, and the company seems to have played both to those weaknesses and to his ego, in order to place him squarely in the line of fire should things go awry.

Anyhow, he faces a last day's grilling at the hands of the legals representing interested parties tomorrow. How much they go for him personally, or for his bosses and their enforcers, remains to be seen; but whichever happens I think there could be some very interesting stuff yet to come. Oh, and on that note, there's still the open question of the potential rôle of The Official Secrets Act to consider - Jenkins did after all approach the enquiry in the first instance about immunity from prosecution, and he did, after all, join ICL at the time it was still decidedly a government arm...