The Post Office scandal is turning out to be far worse than we thought

Post Office Sign

Earlier this week, I binged on the entire ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, and was suitably gobsmacked and horrified. Could this really have happened in modern Britain, with so many innocent men and women prosecuted then persecuted? But I had to remind myself: this is a fictionalised account; trial by media is never a good idea; remember The Crown; and the truth could be very different.

Well, we now see that the truth is every bit as ghastly as ITV portrayed. It was already, by common consent, the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. We knew all that. But as each day goes by, it appears to get, if it’s possible, ever more unforgivable, disgraceful and scandalous.

How the victims can ever be properly compensated is anyone’s guess. How the Post Office’s reputation is ever going to recover, I have no idea. And that’s before we get to Fujitsu, Paula Vennells and Sir Ed Davey.

So, what do we hear today? That the Post Office delayed the Inquiry, further prolonging the agony for the innocent victims, by sending in huge numbers of duplicate documents and then, no joke, marking them as “new material”. It did so, no coincidence M’lud, just before the man responsible for Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon system was due to give evidence. We also hear that the questionnaire submitted by the Post Office contained a number of inaccuracies and over-simplifications. And of course, the Post Office already stands accused of failing to disclose relevant documents, a full twelve years after investigators declared Horizon faulty.

I can’t be the only person to be struck by the horrible irony that the organisation responsible for delivering mail to us all can be quite so catastrophically incapable of delivering accurate material to a legal inquiry. No wonder the lawyer representing the Post Office said it was a priority for his client to “improve the release of documents”.

We’re also witnessing an unedifying, nausea-inducing scramble to cover backs and splutter “not me, guv”. Ed Davey says, implausibly, that as a government minister he just believed what he was told. Keir Starmer insists that as boss of the Crown Prosecution Service he couldn’t possibly have known that the Crown Prosecution Service was prosecuting postmasters. Paula Vennells has handed back her CBE before she was required to do it anyway. And her former colleague Angela van den Bogerd is worried that the ITV drama inaccurately portrays her, without specifying how.

Who else? Well, former Post Office investigator, Stephen Bradshaw, declares that he isn’t a “mafia gangster” and that he’s actually just a “small cog”. I bet that’s not on his CV. And Fujitsu, which has just posted a multi-million-pound profit for its UK business, is strangely silent, perhaps hoping that the whole thing will just go away. Hint: it won’t.

Is anyone actually going to stand up and admit fault? Don’t hold your breath. In the world of corporate affairs, bullet-dodging is the first skill they teach you, as the inquiry is discovering.

Still, the Post Office insists that it wants to get to the truth, and apologises for its chaotic response so far. That’s the least we must expect. In fact, we must hope that it is only Post Office incompetence at work. Because the more that we hear about this 25-year slow-motion car crash, mowing down thousands of innocent postmasters and postmistresses, and causing goodness only knows how much human suffering and even death, the more it becomes possible that what we are witnessing is not just corporate incompetence. It’s not even just corporate deceit and back-covering. It’s quite possibly corporate evil.

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