Post Office: Rubbish application
Sir Peter Coulson was persuaded not to speak out over the suggestion that he backed Mr Justice Fraser’s decision not to recuse himself in the Post Office litigation because they were friends.
The now retired Court of Appeal judge said the Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Sue Carr, and then Master of the Rolls, Sir Geoffrey Vos, talked him out of it.
The judge has reflected on his limited role in the Post Office litigation in his new book, The Practice of Judging. We interviewed him yesterday.
In a chapter on ‘things not to’, he advises judges not to react to public criticism and talked about two instances where he was in the firing line.
The first involved a social media response to an appeal ruling on turning off a child’s life support. The other, concerning the Post Office case, showed “it is not just the press and social media that can peddle untruths about judges”.
In 2019, in what Sir Peter called “the last, rather desperate, throw of the dice”, the Post Office had applied to Mr Justice Fraser to recuse himself from the case. He refused to do so and the Post Office sought to appeal.
“The application was rubbish, and I refused it,” Sir Peter said.
“It subsequently became apparent that, as far as the Post Office was concerned, I had refused the recusal application because I was a friend of Mr Justice Fraser’s (it never seemed to occur to them that the application was rubbish).”
This came up again during Sir Wyn Williams’ inquiry, “when leading counsel [Lord Grabiner] who had presented the recusal application and drafted the application for permission to appeal was cross-examined. It appeared he believed this at the time of the application and still believed it at the time of the inquiry.
“My only comment on his performance would be that, despite the passage of time and the revelations of all that the Post Office had sought to suppress, he seemed blithely unaware of his position on the wrong side of history.”
Sir Peter recounted that he had been “unhappy with the suggestion of impropriety”, primarily because he had only agreed to consider the application for permission at all “as a favour to the then vice-president of the Court of Appeal Civil Division, who had asked me to do it because it was a TCC case and therefore well within my expertise…
“To have my willingness to be a team player then turned on me as some sort of alleged bias (Peter Fraser and I have been amicable colleagues for many years and get on well, but that is the extent of our relationship) was galling in the extreme.”
He said his first reaction was to respond publicly. But the Lady Chief Justice and Master of the Rolls “advised me that it was much better to let the matter lie, and it did not take them long to persuade me of the correctness of that view”.
Another contentious element of the recusal application was Lord Grabiner’s comment that “I am not the only judicial figure or barrister that has looked at this… It has also been looked at by another senior person before the decision was taken to make this application”.
Sir Peter described this as “particularly offensive”. He wrote: “This was, I regret to say, classic establishment tactics: to try to disconcert the judge, and then me, with the vague threat that some senior, unnamed figure also considered there was force in the application, such that we refused it at our peril.
“It was the strategy of the playground: ‘My friend doesn’t like you either.’ I said that such comments should simply not have been made.”
It was only in 2022 that it emerged that this senior person was in fact Lord Neuberger, the former Master of the Rolls and president of the Supreme Court, who Sir Peter said has “an impeccable reputation as one of the best judges since the war”.
He went on: “He had been very kind and generous to me throughout my judicial career. I could only assume that he had been shown a handful of documents taken out of context.”
Sir Peter also rejected another permission to appeal over other findings of Fraser J.
He later discovered that two people he knew, including a former pupil, lived in the Hampshire village of South Warnborough, where Jo Hamilton – one of the leading subpostmasters in the case – also lived.
“Both spoke very highly of her. Accordingly, on the day the convictions were quashed, I sought out Jo outside the Royal Courts of Justice and congratulated her on the result.
“She subsequently sat in with me in the CACD when she was doing an Open University law degree and she was the guest of honour at my Grand Night in Gray’s Inn when I was treasurer in 2024. She is a woman of remarkable resilience, fortitude and optimism.
“So yes, I felt I did justice in my peripheral involvement in the Post Office cases. But the real hero of that case, and the person who had to show nearly as much resilience as Jo Hamilton, was Mr Justice Fraser.
“When Jo Hamilton wrote her autobiography, she inscribed a copy of her book to me and asked me to give another copy to Mr Justice Fraser. In his copy, she had written, ‘Thank you for changing so many lives’.
“In case you wondered, it is for moments like that that you become a judge.”
Leave a Comment