'CBE for Post Office boss says it all about our honours system'

05 January 2024 , 22:00

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Paula Vennells CBE (Image: PA)

I often use the first column of the year to urge you to look past the diversionary trinkets handed to celebrities and focus on the inherent corruption of the country’s honours system.

This year I don’t need to as I know three stories on the subject have sent your blood pressure to the moon: Liz Truss dishing out honours to 11 cronies after being prime minister for as long as it takes a lettuce to wilt before she was forced out in shame.

Lady Michelle Mone, still a member of the Lords despite admitting she lied about her links to a firm that made £60million off taxpayers from PPE that was never used.

And Paula Vennells, who led the Post Office from 2012-2019 when more than 700 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting due to a flawed computer system which resulted in many of them being jailed or made bankrupt.

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The cast of Mr Bates vs The Post Office

At least 60 victims of this scandal died without seeing justice or compensation, four took their own lives and many others had mental breakdowns. Meanwhile Vennells left the Post Office with a £389,000 bonus, lucrative posts advising the Cabinet Office and an NHS trust, and, naturally, a CBE for her services to the organisation.

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More than 500,000 people have signed a petition demanding she hand that honour back after this week’s heart-breaking ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office exposed the backside-covering cruelty that went on under Vennells’ watch.

Viewers were consumed with rage watching decent people who served their communities so well, and so honestly, having their lives ripped apart and their names cast into the gutter. Some found it so painful they switched off.

Like the majority of miscarriages of justice in this country the most galling aspect was that even when it was obvious that there had been a cover-up following appalling corporate behaviour, nobody at the top was held responsible for the ruined lives.

Once again it took brave journalists, dedicated campaigners and a TV drama to expose the heinous crimes inflicted on these people. The witch-hunt, the denials, the lost evidence, the withheld documents, the fobbing off with inquiries, the cynical deals, the empty apologies, the taxpayer billions eaten up by legal bills, the horrendously belated and inadequate compensation and the complete absence of heads rolling.

All of it is so, so familiar.

I’m sure many of you were shouting a version of this at your tellies: “Why haven’t the Post Office bosses, like all of the innocent workers they persecuted, been taken to court, given cheap legal teams and told to prove their innocence or go to jail?”

The answer? Because those at the top cannot be seen to be failing as it risks the public losing faith in British institutions.

So, as an extra smokescreen, the Establishment honours those at the top instead. Even though the honours handed out by Truss and to Mone and Vennells now look more tainted than Jim’ll Fix It Badges.

Alan Bates, who led the justice campaign for Post Office victims, turned down an OBE last year because he said he would have felt ashamed accepting it while Vennells retained her honour. Good man.

But as long as the corrupt, back-scratching, power-enabling honours system remains, the shame is on every British citizen for allowing it.