For a primetime TV drama, whether or not your show is a hit is usually settled by your ratings. But ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office has raised the bar – by prompting the government to introduce emergency legislation aimed at quashing thousands of improper convictions that ruined the lives of sub-postmasters across the country. Before the TV drama, though, came a lot of journalistic work which in turn relied on the courage of whistleblowers. In some cases, these were people targeted by the Post Office machine, but insiders in Fujitsu and the Post Office did their part too.
So, in the spirit of celebrating whistleblowers, here are five of the best books by and about people who’ve taken on big power.
The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis
Nick Wallis has a good claim to have done more than any other journalist to have reported on the decades-long Horizon crisis. His retelling of what happened relies on the endless (and nightmarish) work of families trying to clear their names – but it was only when people inside the headquarters of the Post Office and Fujitsu started revealing what they knew that the scale of the preventable, mass miscarriage of justice became clear.
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg is the former Pentagon official and security contractor whose growing despondency at the Vietnam war led him to painstakingly photocopy 7,000 pages of classified documents and share them with newspapers.
Nixon’s attempts to secure Ellsberg’s conviction led to the appointment of his infamous “plumbers”, whose burglary of the Watergate Hotel eventually ended Nixon. This 2002 autobiography is Ellsberg’s account of his extraordinary life as a whistleblower.
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
In terms of the sheer scale of leaked classified information, no one surpassed Ellsberg for decades – until Chelsea Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. Manning’s new record lasted just three years, though, as NSA contractor Edward Snowden passed top-secret records to the Guardian and Washington Post.
The revelations changed surveillance laws across the world, but also raised furious backlash. In this book, Snowden sets out his account of events, including what prompted him to join and then leave the security services.
Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler
Susan Fowler was only 26 when she brought down Uber CEO Travis Kalanick – but her impact was even larger than that. What began as a 3,000-word blog post on the culture of misogyny and harassment within Uber helped fuel the #MeToo reckoning, and Fowler was one of the people pictured as Time’s Person of the Year in 2017. This is her telling of that story.
Truth to Power: My Three Years Inside Eskom by André de Ruyter
Most people won’t have heard of André de Ruyter, or of Eskom, the state-owned South African energy company. Endemic corruption and under-investment has left South Africa with rolling blackouts and no viable means of stopping them in sight. De Ruyter was the man brought in to take on the corruption and keep the lights on – but ended up forced out and hospitalised after being poisoned. Unsurprisingly, his account of his short tenure at Eskom reads like more like a thriller than a standard work of nonfiction.
