Can you get your life back if you have lost your livelihood? What if in losing it you have been unjustly accused? Named in local media? Had your spouse abused in the street and your children told you’re a thief? Been charged in court? Wrongfully convicted? Imprisoned? Fallen sick?
These are some of the questions raised by miscarriages of justice – and were explified during the scene in Mr Bates v the Post Office, ITV’s drama about the Post Office scandal, when the wronged sub-postmasters are told, first, that they have won a historic victory in court and, second, that the compensation they will receive is roughly £20,000 each.
To some (though not all), the moral win didn’t make up for their material losses, since £20,000 apiece wouldn’t usually even begin to cover the latter. But, even then, all the money in the world can’t buy a life back. Further to which: four of those unjustly accused are reported to have killed themselves.
The public inquiry, the Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Bill, the police investigation, prosecutions, fines, imprisonment – all of these rolled together can’t make good the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history, at least in terms of the sheer number of people affected. Imagination balks.
A brief summary: over 20 years, hundreds of Post Office branch managers were falsely convicted of false accounting, theft and fraud: but faulty software was responsible. The public enquiry is investigating to what degree the Post Office and Fujitsu, which supplied the Horizan IT system in question, knew about the faults in the software which led to the proceedings and convictions.
The TV drama portrayed both as doing so – and the former as launching prosecutions which it knew were unjustified. At any rate, the Court of Appeal in 2021, quashing 39 of the convictions, found that the Post Office had acted in such a way as to subvert the integrity of the criminal justice system and public confidence in it. The prosecutions were declared to be an abuse of process.
It is reported that 700 Post Office branch managers were prosecuted, but that fewer than 100 have had their convictions quashed. Even if this figure is definitive and every single conviction is quashed, the legal actions arising from the scandal will scarcely have begun, even taking into account any that the Crown may bring against the Post Office and its management.
Defamation, breach of contract, malicious prosecution, coercion – the list of grounds for potential litigation rolls on. It is impossible to know whether senior figures managing the Post Office at the time will eventually be fined or imprisoned, or the corporate fate of the institution. The police are making much of their investigations, which says a lot about the public interest in the scandal.
There will surely be two conseqeunces, whatever happens to the Post Office executives. First, the Post Office will end up paying far more in compensation. Or, rather, the Government will, since it owns the Post Office. Or, to put it even more simply and crudely, the taxpayer will – since the taxpayer funds the Government.
Last year, it was announced that some sub-postmasters whose convictions have been overturned will be offered £600,000 compensation each. More will follow. Second, the Post Office is likely to lose the power to act as a prosecutor in England and Wales, or at least see that power heavily qualified. (Arrangements are different in Scotland and Northern Ireland.)
In Mr Bates v The Post Office, Jo Hamilton, a postmistress in South Warnborough, Hampshire, is alarmed by the faulty figures that Horizan flashes up, is told by a helpline that hers is the only complaint, and ends up accused of stealing £36,000. When the case comes to be heard, the courtoom is packed by supporters from the village, who sense she’s innocent and want to demonstrate support.
The scene is thus set for the entry of James Arbuthnot, then MP for North East Hampshire, who took up Hamilton’s case, and that of the sub-postmasters more broadly. He plays an important part in the TV drama, as he did in real life – helping to force a mediation scheme out of the Post Office, and then turning on it for not delivering as promised.
In 2014, he accused the Post Office of rejecting 90 per cent of applications for mediation. “The scheme was set up to help our constituents seek redress and to maintain the Post Office’s good reputation,” he said. “It is doing neither. It has ended up mired in legal wrangling, with the Post Office objecting to most of the cases even going into the mediation that the scheme was designed to provide.”
A few days later, Arbuthnot returned to the theme. ‘In 28 years in the House, I have never needed to apply for an Adjournment debate, but the way in which the Post Office has treated sub-postmasters and Members of Parliament who have expressed concern about the matter is so worrying, and to my mind shocking, that in my final few months in Parliament it has become necessary for me to apply for [one].”
I suspect that Lord Arbuthnot, as he now is, would claim no heroics. The garlands would go to Alan Bates, the Mr Bates of the story, and the campaign that he ran with other sub-postmasters. Arbuthnot would doubtless say that he was simply doing his job – meeting a constituent, asking questions on her behalf, not trusting the answers, mobilising other MPs, lobbying the Post Office, holding Ministers to account.
The same can be said of the other Conservative MP in the drama, Nadhim Zahawi, whose persistent questioning in Select Committee of Paula Vennells, the former Chief Executive of the Post Office, plays a crucial part of the story. Like James Naughtie, the BBC presenter, Zahawi plays himself in Mr Bates v the Post Office. Here’s the scene – in the TV drama and in real life.
When was the last time you saw a Tory MP portrayed positively in a TV drama – let alone two of them? Their portrayal has implications. The Post Office scandal is a tale of hero and villains: Bates v Vennells, if you like. And that’s the way we want it: heroes pardoned and compensated; villains imprisoned or fined or both. (There is a bit of debate in the drama about which.)
But in real life, things can be a bit more complicated. Arbuthnot was part of the expenses scandal, as were most of us in the Commons at the time. Zahawi was dismissed as Party Chairman after the Prime Minister’s ethics adviser said that he had breached the Ministerial Code. Nonetheless, the first got the campaign for sub-postmasters going in the Commons, and the second gave it a lift at an important moment.
Seeing MPs in the round is a small matter compared to righting the wrongs done to the sub-postmasters. After all, few MPs have been sent to prison, and those who have been deserved it. Which isn’t true of the 20 sub-postmasters who were falsely jailed. The hundreds who have been unjustly treated can never have the clock turned back for them.
But what can be done must be done. Inquiry recommendations require new laws; compensation needs legal underpinning; any Post Office reform must be legislated for. Ministers should be held to account for their actions. And former Ministers too, as Ed Davey is finding out. None of this can be done without MPs – the good, the bad and those who, like most of us, are in between. Without the Arbuthnots; the Zahawis.