An inquiry hearing has provided a vivid insight into why victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal feel the organisation is still a long way from accepting its culpability for what has been described as one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice. The inquiry has been hearing evidence in public for almost two years, and veterans of the hearings were not surprised by the evidence from Stephen Bradshaw, a Post Office investigator involved in some of the most prominent miscarriage of justice cases. He is a relatively minor figure in the affair – he was not an executive, or a key decision-maker - and in other circumstances his evidence might have gone unreported. But he led the news bulletins today because this was the first day of evidence since the ITV drama turbocharged public fury about the case, and people watching the hearing got to learn what the frontline perpetrators of the scandal were like. Bradshaw, who still works for the Post Office, came across as a heartless functionary. He showed little or no sympathy for the employees he prosecuted and who are now shown to have been innocent, and he dismissed suggestions that he should have taken more seriously the multiple complaints he encountered about the Horizon IT system. “I’m not technically minded,” he said, stressing he had been assured the IT system was reliable. Although he was personally in charge of some prosecutions, he repeatedly claimed that responsibility for dubious Post Office tactics – including the withholding of evidence about the reliability of Horizon from defence counsel (see 2.42pm), and using implied threats to get people to plead guilty (see 4.14pm) or to withdraw their allegations about Horizon (see 3.33pm) – lay with the lawyers, not with him. Despite being offered several chances to show some contrition, or to express sympathy for the victims, he declined (see 10.22am and 2.42pm). “I’m a small cog in this,” he said at one point. And a rather unappealing one too, many viewers will have concluded. Patients are facing “unacceptably long” waits for care, health experts have said, as figures show the NHS going backwards on some of its key targets. Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, is calling for an “honest” debate about Brexit in a speech citing new research saying it has made the UK economy £140bn smaller than it otherwise would have been. (See 4.10pm.) Unlicensed XL bully dogs will be banned in Scotland, Humza Yousaf has said, as the Scottish government moves to replicate the new restrictions in England and Wales that have resulted in an apparent influx of the breed to Scotland.