I am waiting on a mezzanine in a fancy establishment in Shoreditch in east London, when I hear a bounding tread, full of enthusiasm, taking steps two at a time. “I wonder why a kid is coming up here,” I think to myself. Then Toby Jones, 57, arrives. I’m surprised by how chic and urbane he looks, the nippy tailoring on his earth-coloured casual wear: but that’s because I’d spent the week watching Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The new ITV drama tells the story of the class action suit that had Alan Bates, a former post office operator at Craig-y-Don, in Llandudno, at its centre. Bates, an unassuming crusader for justice, is a lot of things – his rock-solid moral compass has its own charisma, by the time Jones has finished playing him – but he is emphatically not chic or urbane.
The scandal is one of the largest miscarriages of justice in British legal history: the Post Office, over a period spanning more than 20 years, accused post office operators across the country of fraud and theft, due to accounting errors that were in fact caused by their own software. It’s a story of jaw-dropping corporate mendacity from the start, as Post Office representatives told numerous operators that they were alone in experiencing these errors, which would ultimately land all of them in court and some in prison. Casting every incident as a one-off, the Post Office failed to investigate their own vast screw-up, and, once they discovered it, covered it up. Compensation has been slow and patchy; many are still waiting. And many things – time spent in prison, lives lost to suicide, ongoing struggles with depression and anxiety, both among post office operators and their families – can never be compensated.
