It is sometimes a matter of timing. The government is just about the last handful of halfwits who believe that the new legislation to exonerate post office operators would have been rushed through this week regardless of the ITV drama. Only on Thursday morning, the delusional energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, was telling BBC Breakfast that the whole thing was a total coincidence. That justice for post office operators had been at the top of Rishi Sunak’s inbox since – “Ooh, let me think” – well before Christmas. The rest of us live in the real world.
But what goes around, comes around. The biter bit. Had Mr Bates vs the Post Office been scheduled for broadcast next week, then there’s every chance that next to no one would have been following the resumption of the year-long and counting inquiry at Aldwych House in central London. In which case, Stephen Bradshaw, a former lead Post Office investigator, would just have had an uncomfortable day in the witness stand being interrogated by inquiry counsel, Julian Blake. After which he could have gone home and forgotten all about it.
Not now. The country is seized with indignation. An indignation all the more righteous for most of us having taken our eyes off the ball. People want those responsible for perpetuating one of the worst miscarriages of justice over a period of 25 years to be named and shamed. They are now watching every move. It wasn’t just a full house in the inquiry room, there were nearly 5,000 following online.
And it was just Bradshaw’s bad luck that he was the first witness of this new era. He was the one whose face would be on the TV. His was the face who would be in all the newspapers. He would be the one who would now be easily identifiable to all his neighbours. The careless whispers, the twitching curtains. People avoiding him in the street.
But in a sense it was also poetic justice. Because Bradshaw never lost a moment’s sleep over the effect the flawed Post Office investigations were having on any of the operators. Not his problem if others suffered acute mental health crises or were made bankrupt. If you can’t do the time, don’t commit the crime.
Nor did Bradshaw ever appear to express any remorse for what he had done. No culpability. In fact, you could almost believe that he thought the operators were still guilty of something. He just wasn’t sure what. I suspect that’s a corporate mindset. That Paula Vennells and the rest of the Post Office boss class – both former and current – still feel the same way. That somehow the operators are getting away with it. That deep down it’s the Post Office and Fujitsu that are the real victims in this.
Right from the off, Bradshaw was defensive. Not on his home turf and often looking towards his own solicitor for reassurance. But he was on his own. Blake began by taking him through his written statement to the inquiry. Did he not now regret that he had not reflected a little more on the cases he had investigated? Had paused to think and join the dots? Bradshaw shook his head. It was well above his pay grade to be asked to think. He just kept his head down and did as he was told.
OK, said Blake. Well, allow me to help you break the habit of a lifetime. Maybe we could just run through the evidence and you tell me what comes into your mind. A gentle word association game. So you’ve said that you never had any idea that the Horizon system was defective. Now let me take you through a document trail that shows you were well aware of the Computer Weekly story back in 2009 and that many operators were reporting problems.
Oh, that. Bradshaw sat back. No. None of that counted. Because the only knowledge that really counted was what Post Office bosses were telling him. Anything he might have picked up himself was just gossip. Trivia. Unreliable evidence. Knowledge was not really knowledge until he had been told it was genuine knowledge by Paula and the teams. Just like he could only trust the football scores when they had come from the Post Office PR team. And at no time did the Post Office bosses tell him there was a problem, so in his mind there wasn’t a problem.
At all times he had only said and done what the Post Office lawyers had told him to do. In any case, Horizon was only a distraction. A secondary mitigation from the obviously guilty hoping for a reduced sentence. The crime he was investigating was the missing money. No one could account for it. Therefore they were banged to rights. Simples.
Not that he was an investigator per se. At least he was, but only to a limited extent. He only investigated what he was told to investigate. He wasn’t paid to use his intelligence to follow different leads in an investigation. So when operators came up with similar stories about Horizon, they were obviously all in it together. That’s why it made no sense to inform the defence teams there were defects in the system as it would only encourage them. Though that too would have been above his paygrade.
His job was merely to secure as many convictions as possible. At least that’s how it appeared. Like all staff he was paid an annual bonus. “Just for doing my job well,” he said. “Not on successful prosecutions.” Really? Hard to see Paula splashing the cash to employees who went public with the Post Office’s malign culture.
Besides, Bradshaw didn’t seem like that kind of guy. He’s a company man through and through. Been at the Post Office man and boy. Used to doing exactly what his bosses required. That’s why he was happy to plea bargain with operators so long as they didn’t bad mouth Horizon.
As he went through case after case that the appeal court had deemed to be an affront to justice, Bradshaw still couldn’t see the similarities. Any pattern to the Post Office trying to conceal evidence from the defence was just coincidence. A lawyer’s problem, not his. And did he ever wonder why so many people called the Horizon helpline so frequently? He shrugged. Perhaps because they wanted to express their gratitude that it was working so well. That’s something I’m sure we could all get behind.
