TEARFUL Paula Vennells denied that there had been any Post Office conspiracy to persecute subpostmasters as she gave long-awaited evidence to the inquiry into the scandal.

The disgraced Post Office boss appeared to choke up after apologising for her role in the prosecution of hundreds of subpostmasters on the basis of evidence from the dodgy Horizon IT system.

However, she spent much of the first of the three days she will appear before the inquiry passing the buck, claiming that other executives had not told her things she needed to know or advised her of actions they should have.

“I have been disappointed, particularly more recently, listening to evidence of the inquiry, where I think I have learned that people knew more than perhaps either they remembered at the time or I knew at the time,” she said.

“I have no sense that there was any conspiracy at all. My deep sorrow in this is that I think that individuals, myself included, made mistakes, they didn’t see things and hear things.”

The former chief executive apparently drifted through her time at the helm of the Post Office in a daze. 

She told the inquiry that she was unaware that the company had been using its powers to prosecute subpostmasters directly, that false evidence she had given to MPs earlier was because she didn’t know the full picture, and that key reports outlining Horizon’s flaws had not been shown to her.

Ms Vennells claimed that rather than being a conspiracy, the whole scandal was a “huge lesson in corporate governance,” something she did not seem personally to have engaged in overmuch despite actually governing a corporation, if her evidence is to be believed.

About 30 victims of the scandal were at the inquiry for her evidence. One at least was not overimpressed by Ms Vennells’s teary performance, accusing her of not shedding “real tears” and her evidence as “lies from the start.”

The Communication Workers Union (CWU) contrasted her lachrymose evidence to the inquiry with her previous years of indifference.

It was now “too late” when she had “no tears when postmasters were tragically taking their own lives due to stress.

“No tears when postmasters were being jailed. No tears when postmasters had their whole communities turning against them,” the union said on social media.

Ms Vennells, who was stripped of her CBE gong after the scandal broke, will be further questioned on Thursday.