Early this morning, I found myself looking at a recommendation from Lord Sugar. Not for a new apprentice, a second-hand printer or whichever executive had survived his televised boardroom that week. This was a character reference for a barrister. On 4 December 2013, Sugar had praised Seamus Sweeney for defending him against Stella English and finished with the words “Highly recommended”. Eleven years later, that barrister sat as an Employment Judge in my case against Cummins.
What a lovely little reunion, courtesy of the internet. The billionaire had found his man. I’d found the same man on the other side of a judicial bench, passing judgment on my character, my evidence and my inconvenient habit of telling the public what I thought of a multinational employer. Between those two encounters sit an argument about publicity, a tribunal bundle that its judge couldn’t access, a three-month-old spelling correction and one of the most forgiving readings of corporate paperwork I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.
Somebody ought to have made this an episode of The Apprentice. Unfortunately, the paperwork would probably have gone missing before the boardroom scene.
Goliath Has Counsel, And A Camera Crew
In March 2013, Stella English stood against Lord Sugar’s Amshold Group at the East London Employment Tribunal. She had won The Apprentice in 2010 and received a £100,000 job at Viglen. The employment relationship soured. English described herself as an “overpaid lackey” and later alleged constructive dismissal; the Tribunal rejected her claim. Employment Judge John Warren chaired that hearing, while Seamus Sweeney represented the respondent.
No mystery about which side employed the barrister. Sugar had the business empire, the television platform and the sort of public recognition that turns an argument in a corridor into tomorrow’s headline. English had brought a legal claim against the outfit whose boss had made her famous. Goliath, naturally, retained professional assistance. David would have to find his own fucking stones.
The judgment records a bundle exceeding 340 pages. There it was: numbered evidence, accessible to the Tribunal, available for the business of deciding what had happened. The Tribunal also watched extracts from the television programme. Imagine that delightful collision of genres: employment law, glossy elimination television and a millionaire explaining what he did or didn’t give a shit about. At least the paperwork had a seat.
Sugar eventually won and took to Twitter to applaud Sweeney. “Highly recommended” is fine publicity when it comes from the winning employer. Strange, then, what the barrister had said about an employee acquiring some publicity of her own.
The Press Is A Weapon When The Employee Holds It
On 12 March 2013, Sweeney argued that English had courted the press to damage Lord Sugar’s reputation. He accused her of sensationalising matters and becoming a “headline-grabber”. Then came the flourish: “Using the media, in this case, was a weapon of choice”. Apparently, it was her “first weapon of choice”.
A weapon. Not a newspaper interview or a disputed account of employment. A weapon, brandished against a man who had spent years inviting television cameras to watch him fire people for entertainment. Sugar could command national attention simply by opening his mouth. English had to go looking for somebody willing to listen. In the barrister’s telling, the relative imbalance of amplification appeared to work in the billionaire’s favour.
The irony is exquisite because this was not a private dispute accidentally overheard at a bus stop. Sugar had built his public identity around employment, business judgment and the spectacle of holding other people to account. Once an employee attempted to hold him to account, the presence of journalists acquired an altogether darker name. Excellent publicity for the boss; reputational warfare from the person who complained. Fucking marvellous.
Of course, a claimant can misuse publicity, just as an employer can. That is something the evidence must establish, not a property automatically attached to whoever lacks a corporate press office. Eleven years later, I heard a distinctly familiar melody in the findings against me.
Suspicion: Now Available In Two Editions
Lord Sugar called English a “suspicious, untrusting person”. He believed she saw deception everywhere and blamed other people for her difficulties. That was Sugar’s characterisation, not a finding by Sweeney. The distinction matters: in 2013 he was a barrister advancing the respondent’s case, not the judge deciding it.
Fast-forward to my Cummins proceedings. Paragraph 67 of the written reasons describes me as a “naturally suspicious person”, particularly towards management and authority. Paragraph 157 examines my tweets about Cummins, treating them as evidence of animosity and threatened reputational harm. The Employment Tribunal’s decision bears Sweeney’s name, alongside those of the lay members who sat with him.
There is no need to invent some mystical transfer of adjectives from Lord Sugar’s mouth into a judge’s pen. The actual parallel is more interesting. In both disputes, the powerful employer’s difficulties with a critical employee acquired a second life as a story about the employee’s character. What were they thinking? Why were they complaining? Had they become obsessed with the company’s reputation?
I would rather start with what the documents said. That preference led to a rather memorable preliminary hearing.
The Judge Who Forgot The Bundle
Before the final Cummins hearing, I had applied to strike out the company’s response. My application concerned documents that were fabricated, and I identified evidence inside the bundles already filed with the Tribunal. The case management directions required the parties to have those bundles available for a CVP preliminary hearing. I complied and expected the judge to examine the material.
Sweeney turned up to the CVP hearing without access to the bundles. When I asked him to determine my strike-out application, he said he had no evidence before him. I explained that the evidence was already on the Tribunal’s file and directed him to it. Nevertheless, he refused the application because he couldn’t examine those documents.
The hearing directions required the bundles to be available. I had mine. The judge didn’t.
Consider that mechanism for a moment. A claimant files an application supported by documents. The Tribunal tells the parties to have their bundles ready. The judge arrives without access to the papers, then refuses the application because he cannot inspect the evidence. It is like taking a disputed engine to a mechanic who has misplaced the workshop manual, then being told your complaint fails because he cannot identify the parts.
In the Stella English proceedings, the Tribunal had more than 340 pages before it. In my CVP preliminary hearing, the documents were already on file, yet the person responsible for ruling on my application had arrived unable to consult them. I wasn’t asking Sweeney to accept my allegations on trust. I wanted him to read the fucking evidence.
Apparently, that was the one adjustment the hearing couldn’t accommodate.
The Email That Spoiled The Character Study
The roots of the document dispute went back to Cummins’ Darlington plant. I worked in Hot Test and had bowel symptoms requiring reliable access to nearby toilets. Occupational Health recommended adjustments. At a SAL3 meeting on 6 May 2022, I understood that the company had agreed to keep me sufficiently close to those facilities. Cummins later denied agreeing to prevent moves to Team 4, the more distant Long Block area.
On 7 July, I told team leader Paul Hardy that I could help out on Team 4 while my symptoms were quiet. I also explained why it could become a problem when they weren’t. The written reasons record that conversation and Hardy’s subsequent enquiries. This was a practical question about symptoms, distance and a production line, not a philosophical objection to lending a hand.
The distinction was straightforward enough for anyone who had experienced unpredictable bowel urgency. Being able to perform a task comfortably on Tuesday does not establish that the same arrangement will remain suitable on Wednesday. The human digestive system has never shown much enthusiasm for shift planning, however much Cummins management might appreciate the convenience.
The Warning That Wasn’t Even A Grievance
Then came the email of 12 July 2022. I expressly said I was not making a complaint. Instead, I explained that management had repeatedly asked me to work in Long Block despite the toilet-proximity measures. The message said the supportive arrangements from the SAL meetings were being ignored. I also described the anxiety of getting caught short and the effect on my sleep.
That email predated my Tribunal claim. It had no lawyer’s varnish, no Twitter audience and no litigation strategy to decorate. Instead, it carried something much more awkward for a retrospective story: a date. An ordinary worker had raised an ordinary problem in plain English. Follow-up correspondence with Holly Palarm asked for reassurance about the same arrangements. Her response discussed resolving concerns and the adjustments already agreed.
The final judgment acknowledges these emails. Yet the Tribunal concluded there had been no promise never to move me to Team 4. Those are not quite the same questions. An absolute prohibition on one department is narrower than a practical adjustment requiring Cummins to accommodate toilet proximity when symptoms demanded it. My July correspondence went to that practical issue, even if Sweeney preferred Cummins’ narrower framing.
And there was another problem. The company had written its own account of what happened at the May meeting, but I did not yet possess the notes.
When they finally arrived, the paperwork was already causing trouble.
Three Months To Fix A Typo
The notes of the May SAL3 meeting reached me in August, by which time their document history showed editing before delivery. The assurance I maintained had been agreed about the distant working area did not appear. On 24 August 2022, I challenged Gemma Penk over that omission. Paragraph 78 of the judgment records the objection.
Penk’s explanation was refreshingly simple: she had corrected typographical errors before sending the notes. Nothing substantive had changed, she said. The Tribunal accepted her evidence, calling Penk and Wayne Anderson credible and reliable. Paragraph 61 rejects the contention that the disputed agreement had been edited out.
Perhaps the three-month-old document really did require late spelling repairs. The metadata alone cannot identify which sentence changed. But that is precisely why the original files, earlier versions and alteration history matter. You test a provenance dispute by examining the provenance. You do not resolve it by announcing that one witness looks like the sort of person who would never do anything naughty with a Word document.
That is credibility as office stationery, and it is bollocks.
Meanwhile, my email of 12 July and my objection of 24 August showed a consistent concern long before the final hearing. The company’s notes, supplied only after I had raised those concerns, omitted the disputed wording. I challenged that omission when I received them.
Yet the judgment treated my suspicions as the strange part of the story. The company’s explanation received a comfortable chair and a cup of tea. Mine was ushered towards the exit marked PARANOIA. Of course I was paranoid. I’d dared complain to the Tribunal about Sweeney’s lack of bundle access at the preliminary. That he was shown this without recusing himself raises issues. Instead, he proceeded to the full hearing, with it in his best interests following my complaint to just dismiss me as suspicious.
A Two-Year Typo In A Judgment About Typos
The written reasons provide their own tiny demonstration of how easily a date can slip away. Paragraph 57 identifies my July email as having been sent on 12 July 2024, although paragraph 65 correctly dates it to 2022. The Tribunal clearly knew the contemporaneous sequence; nevertheless, the incorrect year survived into the official reasons.
It would be petty to pretend that a date error alone overturns a 74-page decision. It does, however, make the lofty dismissal of my concerns over document editing rather entertaining. Penk’s changes were harmless proofreading. Sweeney’s own printed chronology managed to move an email two years into the future. I was the one who couldn’t stop suspiciously nitpicking.
Perhaps a corporate document editor and a judicial proofreader should start a support group. They have a great deal to discuss, assuming somebody remembers to bring the original fucking file.
The Trundle Wheel Gets A Hearing
Wayne Anderson, meanwhile, arrived at the final hearing with an experiment involving a trundle wheel. He said he had measured routes between selected workstations and the toilets. The numbers he gave were 76 seconds from one Hot Test starting point and 99 seconds from Team 4, a difference of 23 seconds. Those details had not arrived as served measurements with a route plan for me to inspect beforehand.
The Tribunal described his exercise as unscientific and accepted it anyway. Twenty-three seconds sounds negligible if you’re late for a bus. For someone with sudden bowel urgency, the extra distance and the conditions of the route require rather more than a manager’s casual stroll. The bowel is not a scheduled delivery. It does not give a toss about a shift manager’s stopwatch. I wanted the ability to examine his experiment, not to watch a corporate witness produce unexpected measurements like a magician extracting a rabbit from the HR filing cabinet.
What made the comparison infuriating was the evidential appetite. My July warning and the edited notes provoked a sustained interrogation of my credibility. Anderson’s unsupplied workshop expedition became helpful corroboration. I could apparently provide too much documentation and still not possess enough evidence. Cummins could provide a new measurement at the witness box and receive judicial appreciation for its spontaneity.
The Letter That Wasn’t Quite The Letter
There was also Chris Paling’s sick-pay letter. The original could not be found, so Paling recreated a document bearing the earlier date. Paragraph 95 accepts that he created the letter after the event and says he acted, at least partly, “to cover his own tracks”. The Tribunal concluded that the underlying pay information was accurate and that the reconstruction caused no material detriment.
A recreated letter might correctly describe past pay. It cannot prove that somebody posted the original when they claimed to have posted it. A printer cannot postmark the past, however respectfully HR asks it to. The historical act and the contents of the later reconstruction are different things. That difference mattered to a claimant already dealing with pay disputes and a considerable breakdown in trust.
Paling did not attend for cross-examination, though the Tribunal read his statement. My mother submitted a statement relevant to the disputed adjustments; the written reasons noted that it lacked a signature and date. Across the hearing, the paperwork seemed to enjoy a remarkably flexible passport system. Some missing formalities became fatal. Others travelled business class with a letter from HR.
By paragraph 227, Cummins’ handling of me had become “exemplary”. That word sat comfortably in the same judgment as a finding that an HR man had recreated a letter to cover his tracks. It takes a particular talent for compartmentalisation, and a special breed of cunt, to give a company that kind of reference while scolding the employee for doubting its documentary housekeeping.
The Coward’s Red Pen, Revisited
I have already written about the distance between Sweeney’s oral judgment and his final written reasons in The Coward’s Red Pen. At the hearing I heard remarks about my mental health, an optician’s appointment and my GP that troubled me profoundly. When the written reasons arrived, some of those oral formulations had disappeared, while the damaging conclusions remained.
The paper version still had plenty to say about me: “suspicious mind”, “specious” argument, “vitriolic dislike”. Cummins received commendation for its managers and HR professionals. My evidence was interpreted through an accumulating portrait of a difficult, distrustful employee. In my view, the red pen had cleaned the language without confronting the underlying imbalance.
Now consider Sweeney’s earlier employment as a barrister for Lord Sugar. That history does not establish he was biased in my case; advocacy and judging are different jobs. It does, however, bring the treatment of employee publicity into focus. In 2013, Sweeney told a tribunal that English used the media as a weapon. In 2024, the Tribunal he chaired treated my tweets about Cummins as evidence of antipathy and reputational threats.
The person speaking publicly changed; corporate reputation remained at the centre of the story.
The Character Verdict And The Missing Paperwork
The practical question is how a court responds when an employee’s distrust rests on actual documents. Will it open the original notes, test the file history and distinguish a symptom-related adjustment from an absolute departmental ban? Or can a reputation for suspicion dissolve every awkward fact before the evidence gets its turn?
That is what makes the bundle incident more than an embarrassing procedural anecdote. A judge’s inability to access material already filed with the Tribunal should not become an evidential failing attributed to the applicant. The same proceedings later produced confident findings about witness credibility, document editing and the supposed irrationality of my concerns.
I had raised the toilet-proximity issue before litigation. My objections to the meeting notes followed when they arrived. The metadata indicated modification, while Cummins offered an innocent explanation. Sweeney preferred the latter and characterised my position accordingly.
The documents existed. The disagreements were identifiable. The chronology could be examined.
What I wanted was for the Tribunal to begin with those things rather than with an assessment of my personality.
Lord Sugar’s Recommendation, With A Small Amendment
Sugar had every right to praise the advocate who defended his company. Sweeney performed his role and the employer prevailed. The victorious client then supplied a testimonial to the world. Nobody called that public endorsement a weapon, although it plainly served the reputation of both the barrister and the businessman.
I have no celebrity employer willing to compose my reference. Instead, I have a July email, August objections, the document history, the trundle-wheel episode and a judgment that accepts a manager recreated a letter to cover his tracks. I also attended a CVP preliminary hearing where Sweeney turned up without access to the bundles, then refused my strike-out application because he couldn’t examine the evidence I’d already filed with the Tribunal.
The hearing directions required the bundles to be available. I had mine. The judge didn’t.
Perhaps that is why I keep publishing. Someone has to preserve the chronology when the official account treats suspicion as more offensive than the events that produced it. The English case had a billionaire with a microphone. Mine had a multinational with a legal team. Both enjoyed the considerable privilege of being heard by a court. What I wanted was smaller: for a judge to read the documents before deciding what kind of person had brought them.
Lord Sugar says Seamus Sweeney comes highly recommended.
I have a recommendation of my own. Find someone with the bollocks to deliver the line Sugar made famous, only with his former barrister on the receiving end.
You’re fired.
And take your fucking red pen with you. Cunt.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- ITV News – Apprentice Winner Has Used Media As A Weapon, Says Lawyer
- The Guardian – Lord Sugar Says Apprentice Winner Wanted To Damage His Reputation
- ITV News – Lord Sugar Calls Stella English Suspicious And Untrusting
- Employment Tribunal – English v Amshold Group Ltd, Judgment
- Employment Tribunal – Thompson v Cummins Ltd, Written Reasons
- TCAP – Seamus Sweeney, The Microphone And The Coward’s Red Pen
- TCAP – Wayne Anderson, The Trundle That Didn’t Make The Bundle
- TCAP – Chris Paling, The Recreated Pay Letter