“Who knew a Tory MP could be so nice?” someone says of James Arbuthnot in Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama which has at last created overwhelming public pressure to put right the grotesque wrongs visited since 1999 on many hundreds of sub-postmasters.
Lord Arbuthnot, as he became after stepping down from the Commons in 2015, disclaims in this interview any credit for running the parliamentary campaign in support of the unjustly accused and convicted sub-postmasters.
He points out that Alan Bates, who set up the Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance and is played by Toby Jones in the television version, is the hero of this long-running scandal.
Arbuthnot, played by Alex Jennings, contends that the whole unhappy story demonstrates the dangers of “groupthink”, and of arm’s length organisations such as the Post Office, for which for many years no one at Westminster was willing to take responsibility.
To succeed as a backbencher, he says, you have to be “obsessional” about the subjects on which you campaign, but he worries that only the mad would wish at the moment to seek election to the Commons:
“You could say, and many people would, that you’d have to be certifiably insane to want to become a Member of Parliament at the moment, most of all for the Conservative Party.
“Because politics has become so immediate and visceral and divisive and downright unpleasant that not many people would want to put themselves or their families through it.”
As a One Nation Tory, Arbuthnot is concerned, too, that the rhetoric from the Right of the party has become unattractive not only to himself but to voters:
“It seems to me to be more strident than I am comfortable with, less compassionate than I am comfortable with, and verging on the xenophobic.”
But he is delighted to see Cabinet Ministers from such a diversity of backgrounds, believes this will help to avert groupthink, and says corruption is much rarer in politics than those who vilify MPs suppose it to be.
ConHome: “You were a Member of Parliament for two constituencies, Wanstead and Woodford (1987-1997) and North East Hampshire (1997-2015). Were you local to either when you were selected?”
Arbuthnot: “No.”
ConHome: “You weren’t local, you’re an Old Etonian, second son of a baronet, your father was a Member of Parliament, you’re a direct descendant of James V of Scotland.
“You are an exemplar of everything the Conservative Party has apparently been distancing itself from in candidate selection for about 15 years.
“And yet you are – this is a term you would reject – the hero of this television drama. Is there a lesson for the Conservative Party in selection about all this, not in terms of class or where you come from, but in terms of character and what an MP should do?”
Arbuthnot: “First of all, I do reject it. The hero of this drama, as is perfectly plain from the drama, is Alan Bates. My achievement in this drama was actually nothing. As I said on LBC it was diddly squat.
“Now I don’t think I did anything that other MPs would not have done. I had the huge advantage both of having as a constituent Jo Hamilton [an unjustly accused and convicted sub-postmaster, played on television by Monica Dolan], who was impossible to disbelieve, and of having the circumstance that the sub-postmaster from Odiham [in his constituency] was removed for irregularities, and then his successor was removed for irregularities.
“That combination of events put me in a position that maybe no other MP was put in. So I don’t think my particular character, such as it is, was that much of a factor in this.
“I am obsessional about things. And in a sense in order to become an MP you have to be obsessional about it and about things in general. You don’t become an MP unless you’re very determined to do it.
“And you just have to have the quality of not letting things go. And I don’t believe my privileged background played a part in that. There are very good people in all parties who have that quality, and lots and lots of them.
“So I’m not suggesting the selection process as it has changed, in which I’ve been involved myself, has been wrong.”
ConHome: “What is going on in the Conservative Party where someone can resign their seat in the middle of a Parliament because they’ve not been appointed to the House of Lords, or, in another case, apparently because they don’t like the policy and may want to pursue opportunities elsewhere.
“This simply wouldn’t have happened ten or 15 years ago, would it?”
Arbuthnot: “Yes, I think resigning your seat because you’re not appointed to the House of Lords, was that what she [Nadine Dorries] did? Possibly it was. I think that’s a strategic mistake, and makes it less likely that you will thereafter be appointed to the House of Lords.
“Resigning because you don’t approve of the party’s policy might be seen as an act of petulance. I know that Chris Skidmore did very strongly believe that it was the best way to make the point that the Conservative Party was going in the wrong direction.
“He may have been right, he may have been wrong. But it also, I think, reflects the lack of attraction to being in the House of Commons at the moment.
“You could say, and many people would, that you’d have to be certifiably insane to want to become a Member of Parliament at the moment, most of all for the Conservative Party.”
ConHome: “Because?”
Arbuthnot: “Because politics has become so immediate and visceral and divisive and downright unpleasant that not many people would want to put themselves or their families through it.
“And as for the Conservative Party, the Conservative Party seems to be changing in a way I find rather worrying. I am a One Nation Conservative, and I worry that some of the rhetoric on the right hand of the Conservative Party is unattractive not only to me but to the voter and to the population.”
ConHome: “You said a few moments ago you felt you’d achieved diddly squat. Is that right? You said yourself you got involved because you had two constituency cases.
“You wrote round the House, you found lots of other MPs, you got them together, you lobbied the Post Office, you were at least partly instrumental in the fact that there was a Select Committee inquiry.
“So isn’t the object lesson that Government can get things horribly wrong, as we’re discovering, but actually Parliament can sometimes get it right if it can stick at it?”
Arbuthnot: “The Government did get this horribly wrong until 2015, by which time I’d left the House of Commons. The thing that got it beautifully right was when Alan Bates – possibly, though I’m not certain of this, with the additional wind provided by the parliamentary publicity – managed to collect together 555 litigants, and litigation funding, and get in front of the judge. That was what changed the position.”
ConHome: “The additional wind did matter?”
Arbuthnot: “I don’t know. He has never told me in as many terms that. But I think it may have done, because getting litigation funding to sue an organisation as respected as the Post Office must have been really difficult.
“And so I would hope that parliamentary backing would have helped him get that.”
ConHome: “So it’s difficult to say what would have happened if you hadn’t been there?”
Arbuthnot: “Impossible to say what would have happened if I hadn’t been there.”
ConHome: “Leaving the Post Office on one side for a moment, how well do you think backbenchers are generally doing at holding the Executive to account?”
Arbuthnot: “I haven’t really given that much thought. I’ve been obsessing about this particular issue. I think on the whole the Executive is held to account, but sometimes, as with this issue, the Post Office issue, and as with the Chinook crash issue, and as with the general issue of resilience, which I’ve been talking about it in the House of Lords recently, and which is another of my obsessions, eventually the Government gets there.
“Whether it gets there in time or not is entirely a different question. And these things take too long.”
ConHome: “Is there any way in which the hand of the backbencher who’s onto something important can be strengthened? Or do you think it’s just up to the backbencher to make the most of whatever case is there?”
Arbuthnot: “I certainly think there are changes that need to be made as a result of the Post Office scandal, which will help the backbencher to get involved more effectively.
“For example, we need to move away from the issue of arm’s length organisations for which the Government takes no responsibility in practice.
“And I think that will be something that will come out of this scandal and will help the backbencher.
“Other than that, just keep plugging away. If something doesn’t feel right, don’t let go, would be my advice to a backbencher.”
ConHome: “There’s a sense in parts of the media, and perhaps in real life too, that this Post Office scandal has put its finger on something, and the something is this: those in power prosper at the expense of what a character in the drama calls little people.
“That if those in power do anything wrong they will cover it up – that the whole system is a system of self-reward, and that our politics is hopelessly and irredeemably corrupt.
“Is there anything in this at all, and if there is, what should be done? And if there isn’t, what can be done to improve the reputation of politics?”
Arbuthnot: “I think there is something in it, but to suggest that our politics, or for that matter our court system, is hopelessly and irredeemably corrupt is taking it too far.
“I think institutions and feelings have grown up in such a way as to make it harder and harder for the voice of the individual to be heard and to be acted on.
“It’s not surprising that large organisations, having spent hundreds of millions of pounds on a particular system, will want to defend that system.
“It’s not surprising that individuals involved in something going wrong will want to protect themselves. That’s the human condition, natural behaviour.
“We have to find ways round that which don’t destabilise the whole of society. And each event like this will I think help us to do that.
“I don’t think politics is irredeemably corrupt. Corruption is in fact rare in politics. I have a huge amount of time for my colleagues in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords, from all parties.
“I think on the whole they are trying to do the right thing while being vilified for doing it, and I don’t think that’s entirely fair, in fact I don’t think it’s fair at all.
“But they’re up against a lot of things that most people don’t appreciate.”
ConHome: “Can I give you an instance of the kind of thing that the readers are likely to get quite hot under the collar about? In saying this I’m reluctant to name or pick on any individual. But the readers who read around would say look, Paula Vennells,
“James Arbuthnot had an Adjournment Debate in the Commons on 17th December 2014, but it’s not until about 2020 or 2021 that she resigns as a Non-Executive Board Member at the Cabinet Office, Chair of the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Non-Executive Director of Morrisons and so on.
“Why is it, readers will ask, that it has taken so long for these resignations to happen?”
Arbuthnot: “Yes, very good question. Serious mistakes were made in not paying sufficient attention to the rumours that were swirling around the Post Office, the litigation that the Post Office was engaged in, and the allegations that were made in that litigation that this was a profoundly bullying, dysfunctional organisation that had ruined the lives of hundreds and hundreds of people.
“Now I think that is again part of the human condition and the acceptance of groupthink, and I worry that groupthink is something that it is very difficult to create rules to move away from.
“It is something to which we are all prone, and it’s very difficult to ensure that we don’t get involved in it. I’m sure I do it just as much as others. It’s just that in this case I had the advantage of constituents in whom I believed.”
ConHome: “How many other of these arm’s length organisations are there which ought not to be at arm’s length? – someone should be taking responsibility for them.”
Arbuthnot: “I think there are a large number but I don’t know what the number is. But I think from what the House of Lords Minister Lord Offord was saying in the House of Lords, namely that we’re going to have to look at all of these again, as a result of the Prime Minister’s statement about new legislation, that they will come under very serious scrutiny, and the sooner the better.”
ConHome: “Are there any particular examples you would give?”
Arbuthnot: “Well one that I would give would be Ordnance Survey. And the reason I would give that is that there was another issue within my constituency of North East Hampshire, involving Ordnance Survey, where Ordnance Survey had a market dominance which froze out a company called Getmapping from competition.
“Now I don’t know whether that was fair, or not. It felt, while I was a constituency MP, that it was not fair. I wasn’t able to persuade the Minister responsible to do anything about it.”
ConHome: “Is part of this arm’s length business that for a long time many of the people involved in politics had been in the Armed Forces, where you are responsible for the people under your command – it’s not an arm’s length thing. Do you think there’s been a change in mentality? – a change to a form of management where evading responsibility becomes almost the point, and you have no training in leadership.
“The Armed Forces were a valuable preparation for many Ministers for several generations.”
Arbuthnot: “I do think that’s true, in the sense that the Armed Forces do provide real leadership training. I’m not sure that leadership training is completely absent from Ministers now, but I do think the Armed Forces are a brilliant pool from which to draw leaders.”
ConHome: “Why do you think ministers of all parties were prepared to accept in principle that they shouldn’t intervene? Was it because intervention had actually often been catastrophic? Micro-managing defence contracts and things like that.”
Arbuthnot: “It may have come out of Margaret Thatcher’s championing of the private sector. She may have instilled such respect for private sector discipline within the Civil Service or within the ministerial cadre that people began to draw the wrong lessons from it, namely that the more hands-off you are the better people will behave.
“But if the consequence of that is that these organisations are run without proper oversight, without proper accountability to the people who own them, then it’s drawing the wrong lessons from the value and virtues of the private sector.”
ConHome: “Should all the Ministers, all the way through to Paul Scully, who seems finally to have had to grip it because there was so much public fuss, should they all, Tory, Labour, Lib Dem, the whole lot of them, should they all apologise?”
Arbuthnot: “All this business about apology I think is probably overplayed and undervalued. It’s quite an easy thing to do, to say ‘I’m extremely sorry’.
“The way most people say ‘I am extremely sorry’ in terms of ‘I am sorry if anybody was offended’, it means little to those who were offended, if anything.
“So I’m not sure that apologies feel sincere or very helpful. I do think there are some people who have a lot to apologise for. That string of 17 ministers, I think if they all came out one after the other and said ‘Frightfully sorry’, I don’t think it would get us anywhere.”
ConHome: “And what should happen now? There’s a Bill going through the Commons at the moment, there’s to be another Bill, there’s a Public Inquiry, but there are a whole mass of people who may not even have been identified yet who would have a legitimate claim against the Post Office, as well as the people who were unjustly imprisoned, as well as the people who’ve fallen ill…”
Arbuthnot: “More than 60 have died.”
ConHome: “What is the closure on this, insofar as there can ever be closure?”
Arbuthnot: “Closure is threefold I think. It includes the overturning of convictions – I think no Post Office conviction since 1999 is safe. It includes redress in the sense of financially putting the sub-postmasters back into the position they should have been in had the Post Office, the Government and Fujitsu behaved properly – to the extent that money can do it.
“And it includes holding to account those who were responsible, and that’s putting before the prosecuting authorities those people in the Post Office, in the Government and in Fujitsu who did what they did knowing what was going wrong.”
ConHome: “Should Fujitsu also be making a financial contribution?”
Arbuthnot: “Yes.”
ConHome: “And could you tell us something about the Chinook helicopter pilots, which is another of your campaigns, and I think is coming back in some form soon.”
Arbuthnot: “Yes, there is I think some form of documentary coming out soon. What happened there is that a Chinook helicopter flying from Northern Ireland to Scotland crashed on the Mull of Kintyre, and everybody on board was killed.
“There was a Ministry of Defence Board of Inquiry, and the Board of Inquiry found that it was not possible to allocate blame to the pilots of that helicopter.
“Two overseeing Air Marshals, Air Marshal Wratten and Air Marshal Day, had the power to and did overturn that conclusion of the Board of Inquiry, and found that the pilots had been grossly negligent.
“This was a breach of the RAF rules applying to Boards of Inquiry which said that only in cases where there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever deceased air crew be found negligent.
“It took 16 years to get that negligence finding overturned, but it was eventually overturned.”
ConHome: “Why did it take so long?”
Arbuthnot: “You might ask a similar question about some of these Post Office convictions.”
ConHome: “Just finally, coming back to what you said about the Conservative Party, what is it specifically that’s worrying you about the tone or flavour of the party?”
Arbuthnot: “It seems to me to be more strident than I am comfortable with, less compassionate than I am comfortable with, and verging on the xenophobic.”
ConHome: “Is this in relation to immigration and race relations and that sort of thing?”
Arbuthnot: “Yes, but not only that. But immigration and race relations are a major part of the look of the Conservative Party.”
ConHome: “Enoch Powell was doing this in 1968, but was very strongly repudiated by the then Leader of the Conservative Party.”
Arbuthnot: “Yes, he was. And yet, we have a Prime Minister of Indian origin, and I feel rather proud of that. We have the Leader of the Scottish Nationalists, the First Minister in Scotland, of Pakistani origin.
“And I think that is a rather good thing. I like the inclusive nature of our politics and I hope that the Conservative Party is able to embrace that inclusive nature rather sooner than later.”
ConHome: “Hasn’t it already done so, in the sense that if you look at the UK Cabinet it’s now become so diverse in terms of ethnic origin people have almost stopped writing about it.
“I suspect if you looked at a French equivalent or a German equivalent it would be less so.”
Arbuthnot: “I think you’re probably right, and I think actually we do race relations comparatively well in the UK compared with say in France.
“But diversity is very important, in order to move away from this issue of groupthink. If you have people coming from different educations, different backgrounds and different thought processes they will be able to challenge questionable decisions much easier than if they all come from the same background, the same education, the same thought processes.
“So I don’t object to woke until it goes too far, which sometimes it does of course. I object to groupthink.”