How a show exposed Britain’s devastating Post Office scandal

More than 700 people have been convicted for a crime they did not commit. At least four suicides. A woman sent to prison while you are pregnant. Bankruptcies. Marriages broken, lives destroyed.

The shocking details of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history have been reported for years, but have somehow remained under the radar for most of the public, despite intensive efforts by campaigners and investigative journalists.

Until last week. A gripping ITV drama series, “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” which aired on January 1, achieved something that eluded politicians for a decade, cutting through a morass of bureaucratic and legal delays and forcing government intervention.

The show dramatizes the fate of hundreds of people who ran Post Office branches in Britain, who were wrongly accused of theft after a faulty IT system called Horizon created false deficits in their accounts.

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office ruthlessly prosecuted them in court for financial losses that never occurred. Some were imprisoned, most found themselves in financial trouble, many suffered from mental health issues and some took their lives.

Under pressure, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday promised a new law to exonerate and compensate all known victims, a sweeping intervention that aims to finally deliver justice after years of glacial progress.

And police suddenly said last week they would investigate whether Post Office officials — who for years refused to admit that the IT they forced managers to use was guilty — should press charges. Meanwhile, one of the former bosses, Paula Vennells, has returned an honor bestowed by the Queen in 2019, after over a million people signed a petition demands to be rid of it.

All this has left an intriguing question: How did a TV show achieve more in one week than investigative journalists and politicians did in more than a decade?

“As brilliant as journalism is, it may challenge your intellect, your mind,” says Gwyneth Hughes, author of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.” “While drama is meant to touch your heart – that’s what it has been doing for thousands of years.”

Mattias Frey, a media professor at City, University of London, argued that the drama shows the continued power of terrestrial TV to change public perception and generate “one of those old-fashioned water cooler moments” that fuel wider public debate.

Even the show’s executive producer, Patrick Spence, was surprised by the scale of the response. Before the show aired, he told his team not to be downhearted if the ratings were modest given the competition for eyeballs.

The day after the series started, he was told by a colleague that more than 3.5 million people had watched the first episode. “I thought I misheard her,” Mr. Spence said. According to ITV, nine million people have now seen the series.

He believes the show has inadvertently become a state-of-the-nation drama, which “articulates a larger truth, which is that we don’t feel heard and we don’t trust the people who are supposed to have our backs.” .”

The case is all the more shocking because the Post Office is an institution woven into the fabric of British life and is more used to being depicted in a benign role, such as in the popular children’s TV programme: ‘Postman Pat.”

An official investigation into the scandal was launched in 2020, and more than £148 million, or more than $188 million, has already been distributed to victims through compensation programs. In 2019, 555 branch managers successfully challenged the Post Office in the High Court.

Despite this, only 93 of 700 criminal convictions have been overturned so far, a slow pace that has fueled campaigners’ anger.

More victims have come forward since the ITV drama aired, but… dozens of other people died before they could receive compensation. When Horizon declared that branch accounts were in deficit, managers were contractually obligated to make up deficits.

Some paid from their own savings to avoid prosecution, even though they were certain they had done nothing wrong. Others pleaded guilty to lesser crimes to avoid prison, even though they were innocent.

One victim, Lee Castleton, whose fate was featured in the drama, told the BBC that his Horizon account would abruptly turn from profit to loss and that more than ninety calls to a helpline proved futile. The post office, he said, was “absolutely determined” not to help him.

As news of his alleged misdeeds filtered through the community, Mr Castleton and his family were accused of street theft, his daughter was bullied at school and developed an eating disorder. Forced to travel far away to look for work, he slept in his car.

Such stories form the beating heart of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office”, the result of three years of work. The truth of what happened was “incredible,” said Ms. Hughes, the show’s writer. “If I wrote those things fictionally, no one would believe me, people would stop.”

The heroic Mr. Bates, played by Toby Jones, is portrayed as an even-tempered and tireless character who – like other victims – was told by the post office that he was the only one reporting problems with Horizon.

He found others, formed a group of victims and prosecuted their cases with meager resources, fighting a succession of setbacks to achieve an extraordinary victory in the courts.

“Everyone loves an underdog, and we had a lot of underdogs,” Ms. Hughes said, adding that Mr. Bates may look like a mild-mannered, bearded fan of real ale, but also “a terrier; he is wise, he is smart, he is very good at planning for the future.

“He’s a gift as a character in a way, he has a complexity: comes the hour, comes the man,” she said. “He has led this long march of misunderstood and unheard people, and he has kept his sense of humor.”

A few politicians were allies in the victims’ cause, most notably James Arbuthnot, a Conservative MP (now in the House of Lords) who fought on behalf of a constituent wrongly accused of stealing £36,000.

There is also a cameo role for another Conservative lawmaker, Nadhim Zahawi, who played himself in the drama and questioned Ms Vennells, the former post office boss, during a parliamentary committee hearing.

To viewers, Mrs Vennells emerges as the stubborn face of the Post Office, someone determined to defend his reputation rather than concern himself with the victims, a position made all the more surprising because she is an ordained Anglican priest ( although she has relinquished any major role). in church in 2021).

Fujitsu, the Japanese company that developed the Horizon system, is also under increasing pressure, with politicians hoping to recover some of the costs of compensating victims from the company, which is still worth billions of pounds of contracts with the British government.

Professor Frey worries that viewers may have seen a “simple David and Goliath story” while lawyers and politicians have to grapple with something more complex. He sees a risk that “the pressure that needs to be put on politicians to clean up this mess may come in an undifferentiated way.”

Mrs Hughes is also concerned about that. “I hope they do the right thing for all our dear subpostmasters, but I also hope they find a way to do it that won’t cause further problems down the line,” she said. “Thank God that’s not my job.”