Some stories feel so unbelievable that every time you think of them again, you have to sit with the basic concept for a few moments just to remind yourself how truly, staggeringly outrageous the whole business is. It’s almost as if your head has to be got round it all over again, every single time you go there. I’m like that with the Post Office scandal, which as of this week is the subject of an active public inquiry.
In the spirit of rearranging our heads once more, let’s do the brief summary: between 2000 and 2014, 736 subpostmasters and postmistresses were prosecuted of theft, fraud and false accounting in the branches of the Post Office they ran. Their lives – and the lives of thousands of others – were torn apart. They were financially ruined, put out of work, locally shunned, driven into poor health and addiction, saw their marriages destroyed. Some – from a 19-year-old woman to mothers of young children to all manner of others – were imprisoned for many months. At least 33 victims of the scandal are now dead; at least four reportedly took their own lives. But … they had done nothing wrong. They had done nothing wrong. The blame in fact lay with Horizon, a faulty computer system designed by Fujitsu and imposed on their branches by Post Office management.
