Paula Vennells

Chocolatelovinggran

Please acknowledge the role of Private Eye in raising this subject early and often, and Radio 4, before it was made into a television programme.
I guess these were not Ms Vennell's reading or listening choices.

I honestly believe that Private Eye should be compulsory reading for all our lords and masters. They do make mistakes but if they go back to the same subject again and again and again, there's generally some sort of skulduggery going on.

I believe someone asked what sort of god she served. Dreadful choice by Church of England. (I did work with someone whose husband was a bishop and she was a cruel bully.) Hope they throw the book at her but I expect she will wriggle out if it.

Deedaa

Well she's managed, single handedly, to put back the fight for women's equality by decades. And she's not done the Church Of England much good either.

I totally agree. Dissolving into tears during questioning will just confirm the male chauvinists’ view that women don’t have the backbone for the responsibility of the top jobs. I am disgusted at such pathetic behaviour over and above the misery she has caused others. The evidence shows she was totally callous to those below her who were in trouble not of their own making.

If only life was so black and white and consisted only of goodies and baddies. Unfortunately it isn't. The complex network of truths, half truths, lies and sheer incompetence may never be fully outlined.
I just hope that the postmasters get the compensation they richly deserve asap.

I’m not sure what she was meant to be sobbing about half the time. OK, it was stressful being questioned, imagine the stress those poor postmasters felt when they were trying to get answers out of the management!

As for being the Bishop of London - apparently the Archbishop of Canterbury was a big admirer of her management training and experience, and suggested she should be on the shortlist. She didn’t get the job, of course.

No sympathy whatsoever, clearly a selective memory which I don't buy at all. I can remember and recall details of significant events going back decades, both personal life and even more so professionally. As a CEO she knows, she definitely knows.

It’s on a YouTube channel as well.

M0nica

Few barristers are faced with questioning someone whose incompetence and inadequacies has brought so much misery and unhappiness to so many innocent people and their families.

Whenever during her interrogation, I was tempted to feel a little bot sorry for her I reminded myself that her failings put innocent people in prison, led to an innocent child being born in prison and leading at least one postmaster to commit suicide. Not to mention physical and mental illnesses in many more.

If I have felt a tiny bit sorry for her during interrogation, believing from her disingenuous answers that she might have been just incompetent, I am reminded of what she has done by the barristers.
They are doing an excellent job of unpicking any defence she thought she might have. That is their job.

Four subpostmasters committed suicide, I believe.

How many died, distressed, with the shame of being thought of as robbing their local communities hanging over them?
How many families shunned by their communities?

How many children had a parent sent to prison and spent years being bullied at school as a result?

It is indeed their business to know. They are paid to know.

I hope that by the end of the inquiry we will have an idea of the whole group who took part in the cover up and how their interactions - or inaction - led to the years of persecution. Including Fujitsu operatives who must have known better than anyone else what the failings of the system were.

This isn't to say PV gets out of her responsibilities.

( I wonder if it will develop into an all blaming each other situation full of "I don't recalls" or "I did warn x or Y but thought she/he would pursue it"

Germanshepherdsmum

I agree. Everything seems to have been the responsibility of someone else - I didn’t ask, I wasn’t told, I didn’t see that, I don’t remember …

I am reminded of US President Truman who had a sign on his desk saying “The buck stops here” and I think that if the top person in an organisation pleads ignorance that is entirely their fault.
It is their business to know, it is what “justifies” their eye-watering financial and other rewards.
Others may be complicit but the ultimate responsibility and culpability always lies with the person on whose desk “the buck stops”

I don't believe for one instant that Paula Vennells will be feeling suicidal. You need a conscience to believe you've done something wrong (it was everybody else) and she obviously doesn't. She appears to have a self belief which will help her stay afloat. Her tears were mainly for herself when she found she was skewered to the post and couldn't find a response which was going to get her free of it.
If I was one of the victims of her gross incompetence/negligence/conspiracy/crimes I would want to see the Barristers skewering her. That is their job and half the time she led with her chin. All I saw was a woman without real empathy to the damage she had caused and who was thinking, "Poor me, poor me."

Absolutely! .How does she sleep at night when she is not far short of a murderer!!

she has a husband and two adult sons.

Yes definately a woman with problems. Hope you all realise after leaving the P.O she got a highly paid role as a NHS manager not sure if she is still in that role which also meant she will get a NHS pension This womwn really is beyond belief

I have watched her 3 days of interrogation at the Inquiry and have felt unreasonable glee when she cries!

It just confirms what a lot of people believe, that not all so called Christians care about their fellow man.
I’ve been watching this awful woman she should definitely have a custodial sentence in my opinion but I doubt she will and that will be another miscarriage of justice

Smileless2012

PV isn't the only one who needs to take responsibility but she need to take it for the part she played.

Yes she does. I have no sympathy for her but I do understand the postmasters wanting all who were complicit to be questioned and dealt with according to how much they were involved in the cover up.

Message deleted by Gransnet. Here's a link to our Talk guidelines.

Manipulative, self-serving woman. Supposed woman of the cloth, ha, blooming ha.

PV isn't the only one who needs to take responsibility but she need to take it for the part she played.

I admit it, I haven`t read all the comments here, and only watched snippets on the tv.. but...
leaving aside the "christian" aspect, as I try to be one...
I am so gutted with this farce,, showing how corrupt our society is... and just lately have seen that word, corruption, voiced just a couple of times on the media, newspapers mostly.
it is about time someone somewhere admitted that we live in a corrupt society, and it is about sometime, someone actually did something about it.... what? starts at the top? all this election talk,, not naming any particular party, aren`t they all as bad???

not a dickey, (pardon my departure to childish language) not a dickey about the pollution from the Water Boards, etc. etc. etc... I am heartily sick of the lot of them.. do I vote this election,?? I am torn, what or who to vote for, Change???? what change are we being promised,, continuing ...shaking head here,,, feel for the youngsters inheriting this.

One of the postmasters said that Vennells wasn't in charge when the PO accused her of stealing. She was sent to prison and said that others needed to answer for this too.

Smileless2012

The barristers were doing what they'd been to do. If PV had done her job, because if her 'evidence' is to be believed she clearly didn't, this entire debacle could have been stopped when she took charge.

What is going to be difficult is disentangling the several people who had undoubtedly got knowledge something was very, very wrong but none of them pushed it to the point of demanding investigations as the snippets reached them, instead suppressing that knowledge both in their own heads and within the organisation.

But PV's job was to oversee the situation and take action once evidence started to come to light not ostrich head in the sand.

I would have found it too frustrating to watch eazybee. Mr. S. did and was often heard laughing and saying 'b....cks', 'crap' and FGS.