Now ITV’s Post Office drama is over, the self-serving blame game kicks off

The public outcry about the Post Office accounting scandal, sparked by an ITV miniseries, has forced MPs to speed up the pursuit of justice for hundreds of wrongly convicted post office managers – but they haven’t missed the opportunity to fling mud at their opponents, says Sean O’Grady

Monica Dolan as subpostmistress Jo Hamilton in ITV’s hit drama ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’ (ITV)

Human nature being what it is, it was inevitable that the long-running Post Office/Horizon IT scandal – once it had been highlighted by a powerful TV miniseries – was going to be weaponised for party political purposes. And so now, a great blame game has come to pass.

Since Mr Bates vs The Post Office was shown on ITV last week, the scandal of the faulty accounting software – which, for some 16 years after its rollout in 1999, was responsible for criminalising hundreds of innocent post office managers, many of whom were sent to jail – has been thoroughly weaponised for electoral gain.

And it’s a dispiriting spectacle. Every politician, eagerly assisted by their allies in the press, wants to dump some disgrace and obloquy upon their opponents. The public is angry, the thinking goes, so why not make them angry with a political enemy?

Nigel Farage, the president of Reform UK, wants to blame Keir Starmer, because Starmer was the director of public prosecutions for a time while all this was going on – even though the victims of the scandal were subjected to private prosecutions by the Post Office.

Ed Davey, now the Liberal Democrat leader but then a junior minister responsible for postal affairs in 2010-12, is also being scapegoated for not doing enough during his time in office. In reply to the post office managers who are calling for him to resign, a party spokesperson said Davey had been lied to “on an industrial scale” by the Post Office and other ministers.

And, of course, the opposition can blame the entire Conservative Party, up to and including Rishi Sunak, because it’s been in power since 2010; and the Tories can blame Labour because they were in charge of the Post Office, a nationalised industry owned by the state, at the time when the Horizon disaster began to destroy lives in the early 2000s.

This week, we may expect some solemn but spiky exchanges between Sunak and Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions – questions asked now, across the political realm, that would not have been asked had ITV not decided to take up the story.

The damage long since done – and with glacial progress having been made towards exoneration, justice and recompense in more recent years – the parties are now engaged in a tragi-comic auction to see who can promise the fastest delivery of justice, with two former justice secretaries, Rob Buckland (Conservative) and Charlie (Lord) Falconer (Labour) forming an impromptu cross-party coalition demanding a law to quash the relevant convictions en masse.

One might well ask why they didn’t hatch such an idea, or launch some other appropriate campaign, some years previously. Buckland says now, ruefully, that “all of us could have done more”, and such sentiments fall easily from the lips of those in power who are now troubled by their own errors and omissions.

On a cold Monday evening, when they’d usually find better things to do, our MPs packed out the chamber to listen to a statement by Kevin Hollinrake, a minister of state in the business department – a well-meaning and sincere man, who delivered very little that was new. Backbencher after backbencher rose to make the same indignant points; would that they had campaigned with the same passion years, even decades ago.

The honourable exceptions in all of this include Kevan Jones, a Labour man, and James (now Lord) Arbuthnot, who took up the issues raised in Private Eye (and other parts of the media, as it happens) and waged a lonely war against the Post Office and a complacent political establishment. But, until ITV came along, the cause was never in the true sense popular: it was a bit boring and complicated, and there were frankly no votes in it. Complexities in both software and the law made it an unattractive political prospect, albeit some MPs made the effort to fight for their constituents.

That past broad political neglect is why, as of November last year, only 142 appeal case reviews had been completed out of the 900 prosecutions enacted during the scandal. This is in the context of some 3,500 Post Office branch managers having been wrongly accused of taking money from their businesses.

About £130m has so far been paid out to around 2,500 victims, but the Post Office has halved the amount set aside in its accounts for such compensation because fewer branch managers than expected brought appeals. They were and are innocent, and justice delayed is justice denied.

Had Toby Jones, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Monica Dolan and the rest of the cast not so vividly portrayed the anguish of those victims of bureaucratic tyranny, our MPs would be arguing about tax, strikes, migrants and all the rest in the usual circular manner.

The scandal has struck a chord with the people, because we all know what our gloriously named subpostmasters or subpostmistresses did: they performed a public service.

In the Victorian era, when the penny post was revolutionising communications and the telegraph wires were the primitive forerunners of the internet, the crown post offices and the sub-post offices in every city, town, suburb, high street and village in the land, with their red livery and royal cyphers, were the manifestation of the state.

It was where you went to tax your motor car, to send your Christmas cards, post a parcel for a birthday, pay the TV licence, obtain a dog licence (for an unchanging seven shillings and sixpence, later 38 new pence), collect your old age pension (in cash), send a postal order, and, for the philatelists among us, order first day covers.

Subpostmasters were responsible to the local postmaster, and ultimately to the postmaster general – someone who sat at the cabinet table. The people who ran these businesses were, and still are, the hubs of their communities, and they deserved so much more than to be persecuted – and then ignored.

Every MP should spend a week helping out in a sub-post office in their constituency. It would do them some good – and, who knows, there might be some votes in it.