The former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells would like the victims of the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history to know that she hasn’t actually done anything deliberately wrong, and that she honestly doesn’t understand how all this has happened. I guess she’s asking all the jailed and wrongly convicted subpostmasters to try to imagine being swept up in a Kafkaesque nightmare of undue blame. So … please add the murder of irony to her notional future charge sheet.

To Aldwych House in London, then, where Paula produced tears in time for the lunchtime bulletins and reprised them for the section in which her emails seemingly found her on a fishing expedition for other “contributory factors” that might have caused an appallingly persecuted subpostmaster to take his own life. More on that horror show later. For now, let’s just say Paula Vennells now “can’t recall” more about the Post Office than you’d expect a tenuously engaged CEO on 700 grand a year ever to have known.

Vennells was sworn in on the Bible with a beatific smile. Trying to recall the last time I saw that unsettlingly detached expression, I realised it was being worn by Liz Truss the day she sat in the Commons listening to her emergency chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, dismantle her entire economic programme in dispatch box drive-by.

Pressed early by the inquiry’s Jason Beer KC how on earth she hadn’t known what was going on, Paula explained: “I was too trusting.” Barely a quarter of an hour later this humblebrag had done a complete 180, as she said: “I was sometimes criticised at team development events for being too curious.” Was she? At one stage Vennells had even been unaware that her organisation employed a team of about 100 enforcers driving private........

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