One of the most odd things about the recent days of the inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal has been the apparent ignorance of the senior staff involved. We’re frequently told that such people have to be paid frankly obscene amounts of money to obtain the most talented individuals for their jobs. It very much appears that one of their necessary talents is not asking questions about important aspects of the business, and in fact almost dismissing them as “beneath their consideration”. I’d have thought that taking so many sub-postmasters to court for having their hands in the till really ought to have rung alarm bells very high up. It’s an awful lot of staff to believe are up to something seriously illegal in one business.
Or is the real talent actually the ability to create plausible deniability and develop a sudden case of amnesia so that they can claim when challenged that it was nothing to do with them?