HM Histories is coming, but Blog vs Behaviour is not being wheeled into storage when it launches. The two can run concurrently because Horsfield Menzies has left far too much material scattered across its own website to abandon this particular goldmine. HM Histories can dig backwards into the firm, its people and whatever interesting shit is buried beneath the floorboards. Blog vs Behaviour can continue the simpler exercise of taking Horsfield Menzies’ own beautifully polished employment-law advice, laying it beside the firm’s conduct and waiting for another professional sermon to punch itself squarely in the bollocks.
Naturally, Angus Menzies has volunteered another exhibit.
His article, “Whistleblowing: Dismissal, Detriment And Attribution”, considers Henderson v GCRM, an Employment Appeal Tribunal case involving protected disclosures, alleged misconduct and the inconvenient problem created when the person formally making a decision might not be the only person whose motive or influence matters. Behind the statutory machinery sits a concept anybody can understand: sometimes the bastard holding the pen is not the bastard who built the story.
Fungus has done it again. Every time this little goblin sits down to shit out an explanation as to how responsibility really moves through an organisation, he accidentally hands TCAP another annotated map of Horsfield Menzies.
The Clean Decision-Maker Problem
Ann Henderson had raised staffing concerns, some of which were protected disclosures. Misconduct allegations later arose and another manager eventually dismissed her. The Employment Tribunal found that the dismissing manager genuinely believed Henderson’s conduct justified dismissal, although that belief had not been reached reasonably. The harder issue was whether somebody further upstream had influenced the process so that the apparently clean decision-maker was not the end of the story.
The EAT said the Tribunal had not adequately resolved that question. Once Royal Mail Group Ltd v Jhuti was in play, findings were required about whether another manager had manipulated the decision-maker, created a false picture or withheld relevant information which then affected what the dismissing manager believed. The EAT did not simply declare the dismissal automatically unfair and fuck off for a sandwich; it sent the issue back for proper determination.
There is an important legal distinction here which Angus himself explains correctly. Henderson’s separate section 47B detriment argument could not simply combine one person’s unlawful motivation with another person’s innocent act until some imaginary composite corporate shitbag materialised. Different statutory claims attribute motives and acts differently.
Fine.
None of that damages the central point.
Sometimes the clean hand signing the decision is attached to an arm somebody else has been steering.
Angus knows it.
Follow The Wire, Says Fungus
The reliably indiscreet little goblin knows this machinery inside out. He has crawled around beneath it, labelled the valves, drawn arrows between the pipes and produced another client bulletin explaining which bastard may own the leak. That has become Angus’s peculiar contribution to Blog vs Behaviour. Other Horsfield Menzies writers periodically hand TCAP an awkward quotation; Fungus keeps bringing us the operating instructions.
Now we have attribution. Another part of the machine, another little maintenance panel unscrewed for the public. This time Fungus is explaining why you cannot always stop at the clean actor at the end of the process, because somebody further upstream may have shaped the narrative, concealed relevant material or pushed the conclusion in a particular direction. At this rate, Horsfield Menzies could save TCAP some hosting costs and simply add a category to its own website called HOW THE FUCKING MACHINE WORKS.
Every time Fungus writes, the mask does not so much slip anymore as file a fucking witness statement. Each article removes another possible excuse based on misunderstanding. Horsfield Menzies cannot plausibly plead intellectual innocence about attribution, victimisation, litigation pressure, disability, procedure or organisational responsibility when one of its own founders keeps publishing unusually candid explanations of how those things operate beneath the corporate surface. The website proves they understand the machinery. Blog vs Behaviour merely has the indecency to compare the manual with the machine.
Attribution Is Organisational Plumbing
This is why attribution is such a delicious subject for Horsfield Menzies. Organisations adore compartments when compartments make responsibility difficult to pin down. HR knows one thing, the manager knows another, legal receives selected instructions, somebody else drafts the paperwork and another poor sod eventually makes the final call. By the time accountability turns up, everyone can point at the next desk while responsibility disappears down the fucking U-bend.
Attribution law exists partly because corporations do not possess independent brains. People create the information, shape the narratives, exert the pressure, give the instructions and make the decisions. Courts therefore sometimes have to work out whose knowledge, motive or act actually counts for the legal question being decided.
Jhuti is particularly unpleasant for anybody hoping an innocent final decision-maker will bleach the whole process white. An apparently genuine decision can still require examination of the person who manufactured the false reason further upstream. You do not necessarily launder a rotten motive merely by putting a clean employee at the end of the conveyor belt and handing them the button.
Again, the legal limits matter. Not every act belongs to everybody. Not every motive migrates through an organisation like airborne fucking herpes.
But Angus’s broader lesson survives: if the outcome smells peculiar, inspect the plumbing.
And Fungus plainly knows where the shit flows.
Then My Complaint Climbed The Stairs
On 23 March 2025, I sent a detailed complaint about Horsfield Menzies Senior Associate Sam Butler directly to Angus Menzies, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin. It raised my concerns about disability-related medical information, contact involving my medical centre, disputed litigation statements, aggressive costs pressure and correspondence I regarded as obstructive. The following day, I chased it because I wanted to know whether anybody intended to investigate the bloody thing.
A complaint is not proof. Maybe Butler had done fuck all wrong. Perhaps my interpretation was entirely mistaken and every contested act had a perfectly respectable explanation. A robust review might have cleared him comprehensively and left me looking like a prick.
That would have been an outcome.
What changed on 23 March was simpler and much harder to wriggle away from.
The allegation moved upstairs.
Before that email, Angus could theoretically have known everything, nothing or some murky quantity in between about Butler’s exchanges with me. Afterwards, the fog had lifted considerably. Simon knew what I was alleging. Rubin knew. Angus knew. The complaint had arrived directly with three senior figures at the firm and deposited the entire unpleasant bundle of accusations on the carpet.
The allegation did not magically convert Butler’s conduct into Angus’s conduct. What it did was create new decisions for Angus and the others: investigate it, reject it with reasons, ask questions, appoint somebody independent, seek documents, obtain Butler’s account, explain why no investigation was required or just let the whole shitty parcel sit there.
Whatever happened next belonged to them.
That is where attribution stops being a theoretical legal seminar and starts climbing the bloody stairs.
Horsfield Menzies Was Not Sam Butler Ltd
The idea that Butler could remain forever isolated from the organisation around him becomes particularly daft once the complaint reaches senior management. Horsfield Menzies was not Sam Butler Ltd, a rogue legal kiosk operating out of a lay-by while the partners enjoyed total innocence somewhere in Mayfair.
Butler was a Senior Associate acting for a client through Horsfield Menzies. His correspondence was part of the firm’s representation. Once Angus, Simon and Rubin received allegations about that conduct, the firm itself acquired choices about what happened next.
From my side of the desk, no reasoned investigation outcome ever arrived demonstrating that those allegations had been examined in any structured way. I did not receive findings dealing with the issues, an explanation of what evidence had been checked or an identified independent review.
That matters particularly after Simon Horsfield’s own public writing about investigations, but Angus now contributes an additional little dagger. His Henderson article warns employers not to become hypnotised by the obvious front man when somebody else may have shaped what happened.
All right, Fungus.
Let us not become hypnotised by Butler.
Once the complaint landed with the people upstairs, what did Horsfield Menzies do with it?
You wrote the fucking methodology.
Horsfield Menzies Knew How To Build A Narrative
The contrast becomes considerably uglier because Horsfield Menzies demonstrated no shortage of forensic enthusiasm when the target was me.
By April 2026, the main hearing bundle stood at 1,657 pages excluding the index. Separate strike-out collections contained extracts from my communications, blog posts and X account. The public judgment records 150 entries drawn from communications and blog material and another 181 entries from X.
That shit did not organise itself overnight like enchanted stationery.
Somebody had to search it, preserve it, select the useful examples, decide what each one demonstrated, put them into order and help construct a coherent narrative from hundreds of separate items. Daniel Rubin then took the Tribunal through that material as part of Cepac’s strike-out case.
There is nothing inherently improper about that. Lawyers build cases. If the opponent keeps generating damaging evidence, competent solicitors would be idiots not to collect it.
The interesting point is that Horsfield Menzies plainly understands how narratives are assembled.
Individual acts do not simply arrive with their significance tattooed onto them. People decide which examples matter. Context is included or excluded. Repetition becomes pattern. A sequence of separate communications becomes a proposition about the person responsible for them.
Angus’s article expressly understands that the story reaching a decision-maker may have been shaped further upstream.
Cheers, mate.
That really is fucking useful.
Nobody Needs To Turn The Judge Into A Puppet
There is no need to wreck a strong argument with some conspiratorial bollocks about Employment Judge James being controlled by Horsfield Menzies.
The judgment is his.
Likewise, Jhuti does not mean a judge inherits the motivations of advocates who make submissions in front of them. That would be doctrinal manure and TCAP does not need it.
The sharper point is easier and rather more irritating.
An independent decision-maker still decides from the material and arguments placed before them. Angus understands that principle perfectly well in the employment context because Henderson concerns precisely the possibility that the apparently genuine final decision may have been affected by what somebody further upstream supplied.
So TCAP can inspect the way Horsfield Menzies assembled and presented its case without pretending the Tribunal did not own the ultimate decision.
The Tribunal decided.
Horsfield Menzies advocated.
There. Two thoughts in one paragraph. Nobody fucking died.
Attribution Was Very Easy When The Actor Was Me
Horsfield Menzies certainly did not suffer an attribution crisis when cataloguing my conduct.
If I sent an email, it was mine. If I published an article, it was mine. If I posted something on X, the firm did not convene an epistemological symposium to consider whether the authorship should instead be attributed to anxiety, procedural pressure, disability, frustration, medication or the alignment of fucking Jupiter.
I wrote it.
Into the evidence it went.
Fair enough.
The Tribunal ultimately rejected my argument that disability and litigation circumstances justified the sustained conduct it condemned, although the judgment accepted in principle that my condition could at times result in emotional dysregulation.
So keep the simple proposition that people own what they do.
Just do not become allergic to it when the door opens inwards.
Butler owns the correspondence he authored. The senior people own the decisions they made after the complaint reached them. Horsfield Menzies owns the litigation strategy carried out in its name. The client owns its instructions. Counsel owns submissions actually made by counsel. The Tribunal owns its judgment.
That is not guilt by association.
It is the exact opposite.
It is refusing to let responsibility become a bucket of corporate soup where everybody’s actions dissolve until nobody has to swallow a fucking spoonful.
The Medical Centre Had A Supply Chain Too
Take the medical-centre episode. Horsfield Menzies contacted the medical centre connected with an appointment relevant to my postponement request, obtained information about alternative appointment availability and later relied on that information when resisting postponement.
Whatever anybody thinks about whether that contact was appropriate, it involved decisions. Somebody decided information was worth obtaining. Someone made the enquiry. Information came back. Somebody judged it useful and it entered the respondent’s litigation position.
There is the chain.
No ghosts. No legal ectoplasm. No mysterious fucking hand descending from the ceiling.
People did things.
I later made that episode part of my complaint to the senior figures at Horsfield Menzies. At that moment, reducing the matter forever to something Sam did would have been intellectually lazy bollocks. Butler’s original involvement was one thing. What Horsfield Menzies did after its senior people were directly told about it was another.
New knowledge creates new choices.
New choices create new accountability.
It is not Jhuti. It is not section 103A. It is basic organisational reality with the fancy legal wrapping torn off.
Fungus of all people should understand that.
The Firm Loves Systems Until The System Is Horsfield Menzies
This has become one of the recurring joys of Blog vs Behaviour.
When Horsfield Menzies advises employers, organisations are systems. Culture matters. Information flow matters. Management matters. HR matters. Training matters. Investigation matters. People influence other people. Managers can shape processes. Decision-makers can receive distorted narratives. A company cannot always hide behind the nearest individual employee when the wider machinery matters.
It is sophisticated stuff.
Then scrutiny turns towards the firm itself and suddenly there is a temptation to turn Horsfield Menzies into an archipelago of unrelated arseholes.
The solicitor wrote that letter.
The client gave that instruction.
Counsel made that submission.
The Tribunal made that decision.
The partner did not personally send that email.
By the time everyone has finished pointing at somebody else, responsibility has been chopped into portions so tiny nobody has to choke on the bastard.
Angus’s own article makes that intellectual trick much harder to perform because he knows organisations do not really function like a loose collection of freelancers who happened to rent adjacent desks.
Sometimes the route upstream matters.
His words, not mine.
The Complaint Removed The Insulation
That is why 23 March 2025 remains one of the important dates in the Horsfield Menzies chronology.
The complaint did not prove what I alleged.
It created notice.
That is enough for this point.
Once the people at the top know about an allegation, the organisation has new decisions to make. If it is horseshit, say so and explain why. If documents disprove it, identify them. If there is a conflict, appoint somebody independent. If no investigation is justified, explain the reasoning.
The complaint stripped away the comfortable possibility that whatever I objected to existed purely at Associate level beneath the partners’ awareness.
Angus’s own Henderson analysis tells employers to examine who influenced a process, who may have manipulated a narrative and whether somebody further upstream matters despite not being the formal decision-maker.
I asked his firm to examine allegations against somebody inside its own litigation team.
No reasoned investigation outcome was communicated to me.
That is not the same legal issue as Henderson, and it does not need to be.
It is the shitty little behavioural fact sitting beside the polished blog.
Who Built The Story?
The smartest question in attribution cases is often not who signed it?
It is who built what the signer saw?
That is what makes Jhuti so troublesome for anyone obsessed with formal job titles. The Supreme Court recognised that an innocent decision-maker can act on a false reason manufactured elsewhere and, in the particular dismissal context before it, the law may look through that innocent decision to the hidden reason.
Henderson required the Tribunal to make proper findings about whether something similar had happened through manipulation, false framing or hidden evidence, while keeping the separate detriment analysis properly distinct.
Angus therefore understands the significance of narrative manufacture.
So TCAP is entitled to ask the broad evidential equivalent about Horsfield Menzies’ own case construction.
Who selected the material used to characterise my conduct? Which events became headline examples? Which explanations were treated as relevant context and which were dismissed as excuses? How much weight was given to disability, emotional dysregulation and escalating procedural pressure compared with the reactions produced under that pressure? Which ugly email became a neat numbered entry while the shit preceding it remained several tabs away?
Those are questions about advocacy and narrative.
Fungus says the building of a narrative can fucking matter.
That really was generous of him.
The Little Goblin Knows The Machinery
The wider problem for Horsfield Menzies is that Angus is far too knowledgeable to claim this stuff is beyond him.
He cannot plausibly believe only the formal decision-maker ever matters because his article explains when that is not true. He cannot say upstream influence is conceptually irrelevant because he tells employers to investigate it. He cannot pretend hidden evidence or false framing are fanciful concerns because they are among the precise issues he highlights.
Fungus knows this machinery inside out. He has crawled around underneath it, labelled the valves, written the client bulletin and explained which poor bastard might own the leak.
That is what makes his articles so fucking enjoyable.
Each one removes another possible excuse.
Nobody at Horsfield Menzies can convincingly plead ignorance of attribution, bias, investigation, disability, procedure or organisational responsibility when the firm has spent years publishing polished explanations of all of them.
The website keeps proving that these people know better.
Blog vs Behaviour simply asks what the hell happened next.
Attribution For Dummies
The statutory mechanics in Henderson are fiddly because section 103A dismissal and section 47B detriment do not attribute acts and motives in precisely the same way. The EAT judgment matters partly because it refuses to blur them into one convenient legal stew.
The institutional lesson is not fiddly at all.
Do not stop at the first person holding the pen merely because examining what sits behind them becomes uncomfortable. Follow the information. Follow the influence. Work out who shaped the account, who knew what, when the knowledge arrived and what choices became somebody else’s responsibility once it did.
Horsfield Menzies published that lesson through Angus Menzies.
Then a complaint about its own Senior Associate landed directly with Angus, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin while the firm’s representation of Cepac was developing into an increasingly extensive case about the conduct of the disabled claimant making that complaint.
After that, Sam Butler could never again be the entire organisational story.
Blog vs Behaviour will therefore keep running alongside HM Histories, because closing this series now would be fucking lunacy. Horsfield Menzies keeps publishing the theory while TCAP keeps finding the practical exercise sitting in its own bloody filing cabinet.
Angus called his article “Whistleblowing: Dismissal, Detriment And Attribution.”
I can save him a few words.
When something controversial emerges from an organisation, do not merely ask which poor bastard signed it.
Ask who built it, who fed it, who knew about it and who owned the next decision once the shit reached the top floor.
ATTRIBUTION FOR DUMMIES.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Horsfield Menzies – Whistleblowing: Dismissal, Detriment And Attribution
- GOV.UK – Ms Ann Henderson v GCRM Ltd and others : [2025] EAT 136
- UK Supreme Court – Royal Mail Group Ltd v Jhuti [2019] UKSC 55 – Full Judgment (PDF)
- Employment Tribunal – Thompson v Cepac Limited and Page Outsourcing UK Limited : Judgment
- TCAP – Angus Menzies And Simon Horsfield Got The Sam Butler Complaint
- TCAP – Simon Horsfield : The Torch Only Points One Fucking Way
- TCAP – Angus Menzies : He Wrote The Fucking Playbook
- TCAP – Rachel Yorke : The Art Of Knowing Fuck All
- TCAP – Angus Menzies : Victimisation For Dummies
- TCAP – Angus Menzies : He Wrote The Fucking Playbook / What A Relief!
- TCAP – EVERY TIME FUNGUS WRITES, THE MASK FUCKING SLIPS