It is a very British scandal. The latest issue to engulf Westminster politics involves one of the nation’s bedrock institutions, the Post Office, whose branches dot every little town and village. It also evokes one of the nation’s self-ascribed core values: the British sense of fair play, which is offended by the idea of scores of postmasters being wrongly accused of theft.
The issue has also been sparked into life by another great British past-time: festive television binge watching. A four-part television drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, was screened by ITV between January 1st and 4th, when Brits everywhere were confined to their couches by seasonal over-indulgence and a dose of the horrors over the impending return to work.
Now, it has morphed into a national conversation about the awarding of royal honours and the need for the House of Commons to defend little people from the rapacity of big business. The scandal could not be more British if it walked around in top hat and tails, sipping Pimms and reciting Rudyard Kipling. There is even a foreigner to blame.
The ITV series dramatised a real-life issue that has been bubbling away quietly for close to 15 years in the background of British politics. It concerns the wrongful prosecution by the state-owned Post Office of at least 736 sub-postmasters for theft when, in reality, the Post Office network’s dodgy IT system, Horizon, was to blame for cash shortfalls. Horizon was designed by a company owned by Japanese technology giant Fujitsu.
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The sub-postmasters were fined and, in many cases, jailed. Some even took their own lives. A batch of those convicted first met in 2009 seeking justice. The temperature was turned up significantly in 2019 when British courts accepted that Horizon was to blame for the series of cash shortfalls over more than 15 years from the late 1990s. Yet the issue was soon swamped in the political arena by the twin tsunamis of the pandemic and Brexit, which sucked up the public’s attention, even as the government established an inquiry into the Post Office in 2020 and started paying compensation.
Mr Bates vs The Post Office focuses on the campaigning led by Alan Bates, a sub-postmaster who rallied 554 of his wronged colleagues and took the landmark legal case that defeated the Post Office five years ago. The reaction in Westminster since the television series would be difficult to over-estimate. With a general election looming into view, the government is scrambling to contain it.
The Westminster press pack reconvened after the festive period on Monday in 9 Downing Street for the year’s first daily briefing by the office of prime minister, Rishi Sunak. His spokesman gamely stuck to convention, by first running through the diaries of Sunak and his cabinet colleagues. Then attention turned to the issue hanging heavily in the air: the Post Office scandal, and the overwhelming public fury generated by the ITV series. It took up almost the entire briefing.
Sunak’s spokesman said the prime minister “shares the public’s feeling of outrage”. Like every British scandal, there must be a head on a plate and Sunak seems determined that it will not be his. Much of the public ire since the ITV broadcast has centred around former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells, who ran the company between 2012 and 2019, when it fought hardest against sub-postmasters and insisted that they, and not Horizon, were to blame.
In 2019, the same year that the high court accepted the essential core of the sub-postmasters’ case, Vennells was awarded a CBE, making her a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Sunak’s spokesman told reporters on Monday that the prime minister would support a review of the awarding to her of the honour, which telegraphed the depth of concern at the highest levels of government. Normally, a prime minister would duck such an issue, but as it turned out, Sunak did not have to address it – on Tuesday, a beleaguered Vennells announced she was handing the CBE back.
As if it needed it, the anger coalescing around Vennells has another British quirk: she is an ordained Anglican priest. On Tuesday, the church warned the public against making its mind up about her on the basis of a television series that is “a bit like The Crown where it diverges from actual fact”. In yet another delicious little twist, Vennells was played in the series by actress Lia Williams, who also starred in the Crown as Wallis Simpson, another woman frowned at in British history as the divorcee who caused King Edward VIII to abdicate.
A consensus in Westminster this week formed around the need for emergency laws to collectively quash the convictions of all sub-postmasters. Just 93 of the 736 convictions (which some say might be 900) have been overturned so far.
No government would willingly go into an election cycle with such a red-hot issue hanging over its head. Expect Sunak’s government to produce legislation soon.
Whatever else may be in the post for the Tories after this year’s vote, it has no choice but to dispense with this issue.