As good as it gets? Susan Crichton and professional integrity

The first of a couple of blogs on an absolutely fascinating day and a half of evidence with Susan Crichton, former General Counsel of the Post Office

I am regularly asked which of the lawyers appearing before the Inquiry session lawyers - particularly in-housers - should watch and now I have the answer. Susan Crichton (see here and here for searchable transcripts and videos in one place).

She was an enabler-victim of the Post Office Scandal. A curate* of a curate’s egg.

For the lawyers under examination in this Inquiry, it may be as good as it gets.

The usual rather wretched non-apology aside, she gave her evidence straightforwardly and admitted most wrongs when they were pointed out to her. She also said she hadn’t done things which the documentary evidence showed she had sometimes but, in the main, presented as honest, decent, genuinely trying to be helpful in a somewhat restrained way kind of witness.

She came to the Post Office from a commercial background and crucially – if unsurprisingly - without any criminal law experience. She thought, it seemed, that the organisational and corporate law aspects of separating the Post Office from the Royal Mail Group (RMG) would be interesting and in her skill set.

She ended, as one in-house lawyer pointed out, gaslit, having, or on the point of, if I understood her evidence properly, a breakdown.

This rather awful human story is told in a restrained, quiet way.

CEO Paula Vennells, who at the end appears to be plotting with her Chairman Alice Perkins to pressure or manage out Crichton, refers to her “feeling the pressure”. Crichton herself talks about her behaviour being well beyond the normal range. “I must have been,” she says at one point, “in a really bad state.” She cannot remember absolutely crucial moments as the crisis built to her breaking point. Any other business, she thinks, would have told her she needed a month off sick.

This referred to her final few days in the company before resigning. She had “yelled” at Vennells, so we were told. She had been excluded from a critical Board meeting to discuss the aftermath of the Clarke advice; made to wait outside and not called in. The Board minutes later criticised her work, work that Vennells had presented to them instead at Perkins suggestion. Crichton felt Perkins was setting her up for blame for Second Sight, an investigation Crichton thought Perkins had led the charge for until it started to reveal problems.

Perkins by this stage had blamed her for not “marking” the review, influencing and managing it . Her reluctance to influence Second Sight, she found extraordinary. Vennells referred to Crichton as needing “strong persuasion” to agree that Second Sight’s draft interim report needed amending before it was put to the Board (more on that in the next post, because Crichton plainly did seek to influence them in some way at this stage).

The concerns of the Board, in so far as they were reported during these evidence sessions, were about their own personal liability as directors, the national reputation of the Company, and the stream of government funding needed to keep the Post Office afloat. Anyone inclined to think the Board were more interested in gongs than their salaries would find evidence here. Faced with an independent report telling them Horizon might be flawed and of the need to review old convictions, their response appears to be a desire to sack or marginalise Second Sight. One wonders if the same would have been done to Crichton, if she had not walked.

I know from my conversations with in-house lawyers that such moments can leave extraordinarily profound and longstanding scars.

Crichton felt she was being scapegoated, and the evidence suggests she was. She managed to escape PO, the period from resignation to joining Lloyds TSB later that same year taken up with holiday and gardening leave.

The evidence contains a blow-by-blow account, thanks to a file note from Paula Vennells, of the time of her crisis meetings with Crichton as she left. “My reflection on what happened with [Second Sight] as I write this today [2 September],” wrote Vennells,

“is that Susan was possibly more loyal to her professional conduct requirements and put her integrity as a lawyer above the interests of the business. She did not communicate clearly what she was concerned about. If as she says she felt compromised (personally and for the business) by being asked to manage [Second Sight] more closely, then her misjudgement was that she did not make that clearer to me on the two or three occasions that I asked her to do so.”

Whilst the first sentence has already sent many of the lawyers I know into spasms of justified outrage and (all too often) recognition, the rest of the paragraph deserves attention.

Julian Blake, Counsel to the Inquiry asks, “Do you agree with what’s said there? ….So, for example, managing Second Sight more closely, did you see that as, in some way, in conflict with your role as a lawyer?”

Susan Crichton: I think what I would have said was that I wanted to ensure that their report was independent and I wouldn’t try and control them in a way that didn’t give them access or ability to write the report in their way, provided it was evidence based.

Mr Blake: The reference there to putting your integrity as a lawyer above the interests of the business, what did you see your role as, in terms of being General Counsel? Was it integrity as a lawyer or was it interest of the business, or were they in conflict?

Susan Crichton: I had never experienced a situation where my integrity as a lawyer was in conflict with the business that I worked for. I was just very focused on delivering the independent report from Second Sight. So if that meant that I put my integrity as a lawyer above the interests of the business, then possibly that’s what I did. I didn’t see it quite in that way at the time.

At the time, the evidence seems to suggest that she saw her denouement more as a slur on her reputation. It was the humiliation of being asked to wait outside the Boardroom when she was expecting to be called in and explain what was happening on Second Sight and the Cartwright King Sift that hurt most. As did her being blamed for Second Sight when it was as much Perkins’s idea as hers, if not more so.

However, her professional antipathy to being asked to influence Second Sight was also part of it. She decried the draining away of her influence, but it was also about her independence. In emphasising influence over independence, being uncertain of her role, may lay the kernel of her problem. We should also not underestimate the impact on her ability to think and act clearly under extreme pressure that such crises have. Her mental health and well-being were plainly affected, perhaps profoundly.

In any event, she resigned, paid we know not how much, silenced by an NDA for almost eleven years. Six years before the conclusion of the Bates trial.

Knowing…? well more of that anon…

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*The phrase curate’s egg comes frome a Punch cartoon in 1895, in which a nervous young curate is having breakfast with a bishop. The bishop says 'I'm afraid you've got a bad egg there' and the curate, not wanting to upset the bishop, replies, 'Oh no, my Lord! … Parts of it are excellent! '