• Playing the victim

Something like that seems to have been acted out by the Post Office recently. According to The Guardian, earlier this year the PO “attempted to use Horizon IT data to support a criminal case against a Post Office owner earlier this year, despite hundreds of Post Office operators being wrongfully prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting because of bugs in the system”. This prompted a colourful exchange between the top cats at the PO and Fujitsu. The latter’s boss retorted that the request that his company provide an expert witness to help with the case was “entirely inappropriate”, adding that the Post Office is “well aware there have been and there continue to be bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon system”. Well, yes: we know that now.

This isn’t one of the ill-fated private prosecutions but a police investigation. This seemed to cut no ice with the software firm, which clearly wants to put as much clear water between it and its ill-fated client while the Inquiry is still in session. Fujitsu supremo Paul Patterson criticised the PO’s desire to see itself as a victim, said that it had misgivings about the behaviour of the PO’s investigation team in the matter, that the PO “continued to have significant cultural issues” and that the request “exhibits a lack of respect to the ongoing inquiry”. You can almost hear the schadenfreude bubbling, if that’s the noise it makes, as the phrases are shovelled out. Patterson must have been waiting to write an email like this for years.

To conduct a prosecution based on Horizon data while the Inquiry is still in session is worse than disrespectful; it’s incredibly stupid. There are times when the rights and wrongs of the case in purely legalistic terms take second place to considerations of public perception.

This isn’t a formal legal consideration, I would imagine. If the City of London Police believes a crime has happened, it must investigate, even if this seems to be flying in the face of popular opinion. The Post Office doesn’t have this imperative. Yes, as a government-owned entity it needs to protect its/our money. However, though legally right, it’s politically dumb for it to call cop at the moment.

The PO continues to be a vital part of our lives, the more so since many banks have closed down. It’s now one of the few places where people can deposit cash (remember cash?). Handling cash can lead to problems of various kinds. There’s no doubt that some of the Postmasters or their staff made bad decisions, though not necessarily criminal ones. Many who regularly handle large amounts of cash do.

Whisper it quietly, but it’s possible that some Postmasters are saying that now could not be a better time to go rogue. The legal system depends on a level playing field between prosecution and defence. The PO screwed this up over about 15 years by non-disclosures and other tactics which – the Inquiry still being in session – would be disrespectful of me to speculate on. The scales have now tipped the other way. It would be hard now to find a jury which would convict a Postmaster based on Horizon evidence. The wheel has turned full circle: it’s now the PO that can’t get a fair trial.

However, this is its own fault. There’s no doubt (except in a few people’s minds) that most prosecutions were utterly wrong in every respect. However, all this – including this recent seemingly doomed prosecution – has created a situation where the interests of justice are secondary to the preconceptions that the majority of the population have about the organisation that’s involved in bringing the case.

It all depends on whether or not you believe that it’s better that nine guilty people be let off than that one innocent person be wrongly convicted. Society hasn’t made up its mind on this point. The PO fiasco may not have helped resolve it.

• Harrods

I worked in this extraordinary shop for a few months just after I left school. I was told of, and sometimes witnessed, some extraordinary crimes committed against the shop, a few of which I’ve related in this article, A Life of Crime. None of these, however, came anywhere close to what the late Mohamed Al Fayed seemed to have got up to with his female associates.

These awful tales just keep tumbling out about all kinds of people. Maf was clearly an oddball, amongst other things capable of picking arguments in an empty room. The high-water mark of his public profile came after Diana and his son Dodi were killed in Paris in 1997. This was, Maf claimed, a plot orchestrated by the Duke of Edinburgh. There are doubtless many websites that exist to prove his case. All I can say is that, as a method of murder, organising a car pursuit by paparazzi leaves something to be desired as regards certainty. None the less, this campaign was prosecuted for the rest of his life.

A few years afterwards, the Queen’s patience snapped and she told him he had to remove the “by royal appointment” crest from above the main entrance to the millionaires’ emporium. This he did, personally, with most of Fleet Street’s paparazzi in attendance.

Now it seems he was a serial sleaze-ball as well. Some now admit that they kind of knew about this but that what they saw stopped short of sexual abuse. Of course, this was determined rather differently in the 1980s and 1990s than how it is now. I’m reminded of talking to a friend, shortly after the Jimmy Savile story broke, who’d spent some time working at the BBC. “Oh, everyone knew,” he said. Really?

My first reaction was shock; why didn’t you do anything? Then I remember that, in the real world, power begets power. You have to be very brave to stand up to it. Many years ago, I chickened out of proceeding with a prosecution against someone who’d beaten me up because I was frightened of the repercussions. The policeman I was dealing with was annoyed, as he was entitled to be; but he didn’t have to walk past the guy’s house every night, as I did. The bully defeated me. Maf, and Savile, were clearly capable of similar levels of indirect coercion on a massive scale.

Shortly after Stalin died in 1953, his successor Khrushchev presided over one of those massive plenary sessions in which communist countries excelled. During this, he said the days of terror were past. Questions were then invited. One, in writing, asked him why he himself hadn’t spoken out at the time. Khrushchev looked round the vast hall. “Who asked this?” he demanded. Silence; a long silence. “That’s why I didn’t say anything,” he said. “Like you, I was afraid.”

Of course, the whole scene might have been stage-managed to make the point. In fact, it probably was. So what? The point was well made. We speak truth to power at our peril. That ain’t going to change.

• On the brink

The most recent (1633) Private Eye drew my attention to a report by Unison entitled Councils on the Brink. Its opening sentence pulls no punches: “Councils across these three nations face a collective funding shortfall of £4.3bn next year (2025/26), and the cumulative figure will have risen to £8.5bn by 2026/27, according to a combination of freedom of information requests and searches of local authority financial strategy papers.”

The various tables pick out jaw-dropping figures. Four authorities, Hampshire, Bradford, Birmingham and Somerset, are predicted to have a funding gap of over £100m in 2025-26, with many others not far behind. The report also has some harrowing tales of non-statutory services, including libraries, day-care centres and wellbeing centres, which many councils have been forced to cut.

Aside from inflation, reduced government investment, increased responsibilities and a shortage of staff who are both qualified and prepared to work for local authorities in such uncertain times, the main visible challenge is that of adult social care. This accounts for by far the biggest single chunk of the expenditure of any council that has responsibility for this, and has risen by 10% this year according to Community Care. This, like so many of the things our councils spend money on, is a statutory responsibility. As the population ages and needs become more complex, the costs are only likely to increase.

A far more insidious time bomb awaits, however, in the form of the Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision. This is a time bomb because the spiralling costs, which might be as much as £5bn, have currently been kept off the balance sheets of local councils. This is set to end in 2026. If fully handed over, between a quarter and half of all councils (opinions differ) would become insolvent overnight.

As the above-referenced Funding the Future website points out, “the resources to fund SEND do not exist within the current local authority set up. Central government has met this cost to date. It is not as if it is new. But, the question has to be answered as to how it will be paid for when the current period of support for these costs from central government comes to an end.”

Our own West Berkshire Council seems to have accepted that this is the matter most likely to catapult it into the world of a dreaded Section 114 notice, effectively an admission of municipal bankruptcy.

It won’t be the only one. Councils provide a vast range of services, some statutory and others not. Almost all are unspectacular and almost invisible: the equivalent, perhaps, of repairing roofs and clearing drains in domestic properties as opposed to the more eye-catching offers of high-speed broadband or interest-free freezers offered by the private sector, or the more unspecific promises made by governments. As matters stand, however, we may find that more and more of these unglamorous ones are removed.

Hopefully, Whitehall has grasped this fact. There have been calls for further devolutions and re-organisations. However, the Local Government Chronicle reported on 25 September that local government minister Jim McMahon told LGC that addressing financial issues facing the sector was the first priority because “we can’t devolve to a system that is falling over”. It is. What happens next? Over to you, Jim.

 • And finally…

• The Guardian reports that Putin has “escalated his nuclear rhetoric, telling a group of senior officials that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if it was attacked by any state with conventional weapons”. Oh, great.

• Al Jazeera reports that Israel “is preparing for a possible ground assault in Lebanon”. Oh, great.

• The BBC reports that “Central Europe’s devastating floods were made much worse by climate change and offer a stark glimpse of the future for the world’s fastest-warming continent”. Oh, great.

• Wikipedia reports that the US presidential race might still result in a victory for Donald Trump. Oh, great.

• I’ve often wondered at the oddness of the fact that not only does Earth have only one moon, but also that it’s so much larger compared to its host than those of other planets. The main advantage – and no small one, from what I understand – is that it creates powerful and regular tides that help the oceans to swoosh around, so distributing nutrients and generally keeping things moving. No moon would not have produced this happy result; 146, as Saturn has, would surely lead to nautical chaos. It seems that we’re about to get another moon: it’s tiny, though, and should only be with us for a couple of months. A close look after one half rotation and off it goes, seeking somewhere better. Hard to blame it, perhaps…