ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office dramatises over four one-hour episodes one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history. But this appalling story also features the best in grassroots activism and British journalism.
As Lord Arbuthnot, a great advocate for the victims of the scandal, put it in a 2020 BBC Panorama programme: “A government-owned organisation attacked, on the basis of false evidence, the integrity of so many pillars of the community.”
Today the Government is talking to judges about how to fast-track quashing the wrongful convictions of the hundreds of sub-postmasters and mistresses. Between 2000 and 2015, more than 700 postmasters were prosecuted for false accounting, fraud and theft. 236 were sent to prison. And four people committed suicide, including Martin Griffiths, a father of two who killed himself in 2013 after being wrongly accused of stealing £100,000.
Jo Hamilton, played brilliantly in the drama by Monica Dolan, is another victim of this travesty. She was falsely accused of stealing £36,000 and, frightened of going to prison, pleaded guilty to 14 counts of false accounting in 2008. In 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed her conviction; the court has managed to overturn 93 wrongful convictions.
Alan Bates rejected the offer of an OBE, saying it would not be appropriate while ‘so many of the victims continue to suffer’
The hero of this saga is Alan Bates, though he would be too modest to see himself like that. The protagonist of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, played by Toby Jones, was sacked as a sub-postmaster for not paying money that Horizon system said was missing.
He set up the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance in 2009 and, along with five others, took the Post Office to the High Court in 2019, where they won.
No Post Office manager, however, has faced any criminal charge for this scandal. Paula Vennells left her role as chief executive of the Post Office in 2019, a position she had held from 2010, to become chair of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. She was awarded a CBE for “the Post Office and to Charity” in 2019.
In January 2023, meanwhile, Bates rejected an offer of OBE from the Honours Committee because, as he put it, “I hope you can understand why it would be so inappropriate for me to accept any award at present, while so many of the victims continue to suffer so badly and Vennells still retains an honour and remains a ‘role model’ to the Honours Committee.”
At the very least, Vennells should do the right thing and give up her CBE — or she should be stripped of it. In the drama, Hamilton asks Bates: “Are they just incompetent, Alan, or are they just evil?” And Bates responded by saying: “Well, it comes to the same thing in the end”. Whether this was done out of cowardice, incompetence or a malign conspiracy, the consequences are the same: lost careers, the shame of being called a thief, penury, imprisonment, suicide.
Some politicians should also be held to account. Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, is one example. He should be ashamed of himself for his role in this scandal. Bates asked to meet him in May 2010, when Davey was postal affairs minister in the coalition government, but Davey refused. Davey said in an interview with Times Radio last Thursday: “We were clearly misled. I think ministers from all political parties were misled.” But this is not good enough. Being a politician with the specific brief of postal affairs, and failing to execute the brief properly when the consequences were so dire for so many postmasters and their families, is a profound dereliction of duty.
Another heroic figure in this scandal is Nick Wallis, a reporter and author of The Great Post Office Scandal. He was working for BBC Surrey Radio and running the local radio channel’s Twitter account when he got in touch with Davinder Misra, whose wife, Seema Misra, was falsely accused of stealing from the Post Office branch she worked at and imprisoned.
Wallis started to follow the story, and his first investigation went out in 2011. He wasn’t the first journalist to cover it though: Rebecca Thomson deserves special credit for writing about it in the magazine Computer Weekly.
Last Friday, the Metropolitan Police announced that the Post Office was now under criminal investigation. The public inquiry into the scandal started in February 2022 and is still ongoing. The ITV drama has led to 50 more people claiming that they were also unfairly targeted by the Post Office. Hopefully, more will come out to claim the justice they deserve. Mr Bates and the assiduous journalists who have covered this scandal are not done yet.
