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It was no accident that in the ITV series Mr Bates vs the Post Office, its long, thoughtful scenes showed green landscapes, dotted with peaceful villages and small towns. The names of unfairly shamed subpostoffices breathe unassuming gentleness; South Warnborough, Clanabogan, Cwmdu, Rayleigh, Bridlington.
The people who ran them alongside small shops were unassuming too, content with hours usually below minimum wage. They were agents, not employees, but contracted to be responsible for all losses including those caused by the shoddy tool foisted on them by the Post Office: the Fujitsu Horizon system. It turned on them and ruined their lives. They were wrongly accused, sometimes imprisoned, and often deprived of home, work, reputation, family trust and the very will to live. The arrogance of executives and the unacknowledged faultiness of Fujitsu’s software ruined nearly a thousand.
Even after years, even after promises of compensation, the heartbreak of the subpostmasters echoes in murmurs of loneliness, self-doubt and private pain. “I lost my dignity, personality and my soul.” “I find it very difficult to be in a room with people now.”
Richard Brooks’s concise, clear and seethingly but suppressedly angry book is a hard read for optimists. This was the biggest miscarriage of justice in our history: more than 900 subpostmasters and their staff were prosecuted and 236 people were imprisoned, and there were more than 10,000 other victims, including those sacked, suspended or forced to “repay” sums they never owed, or who plugged shortfalls from their own pocket.
Brooks followed the scandal right from the start, and with a brief, cogent summary takes us back beyond the 1999 installation of Horizon to the Tory, then Blairite politics of private finance initiatives, ministers drunk on the roaring advance of IT (amusingly, the first use of the word “robust” about the Fujitsu machine is from Peter Mandelson, anxious to placate a foreign investor by saying experts had pronounced it so). Brooks reminds us of the stages of turning the Post Office into an “arms-length” company, including the happily forgotten moment when it briefly discarded an ancient name to call itself Consignia. Then he takes us, mercilessly, through the unravelling of the scandal.
Two questions had haunted me ever since the mainstream media reports in 2011 and, more urgently, in 2019 when Mr Justice Fraser denounced the Post Office’s “oppressive behaviour” and demolished its charges of false accounting (its lawyers promptly tried to de-bench him in revenge). The first of my questions was why, despite several well-publicised government computer disasters, Post Office officials never paused to consider that the brand-new Horizon might have been faulty, but preferred to think that a thousand hitherto blameless subpostmasters simultaneously turned criminal overnight.
The second question was how, arriving as chief executive officer with the disaster plainly happening, the ordained Church of England minister Paula Vennells failed to consider that a faulty Japanese computer was more likely than an unprecedented breaking of the eighth commandment by hundreds of middling, modest public servants who seemed no richer afterwards.
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Brooks deals in forensic detail with the first question: most of the Post Office’s investigators had no auditing or accounting experience and barely three weeks of training, and when they did point out possible IT errors, including one from a victim’s own forensic accountants, they were sharply told that the system was 100 per cent reliable. “If you started to challenge too much, it didn’t go well.”
Some investigators clearly were kept in the dark about their colleagues’ experiences because many of the subpostmasters, panicking at an imaginary shortfall and fearing disastrous consequences, were assured that they were the only users who had any trouble. That was either a lie or an extraordinary failure of teamwork. There was cheerfully callous bias too: phrases were heard such as “subbies with their hands in the till” and remarks about Chinese and “Patels”.
My second question, about the once-reverend Vennells and her blind faith in the deity Fujitsu and unpastoral disregard of individual misery, is partly answered by considering her professional background. She was a marketeer from Argos, Dixons and Whitbread, for which brand was everything. Her role at the last company was putting Beefeater restaurants next to Premier Inns and peppering high streets with Costa Coffee outlets. “Blessed is the brand” was her approach. She spoke constantly of protecting the Post Office brand, and when the heat began to build and Fujitsu’s infallibility was questioned she objected to the use of words like “bugs”, and consulted her computer-literate husband for a less emotive word. He came up with “exception or anomaly”.
The former Royal Mail chief executive Paula Vennells gives evidence during the Post Office inquiry
POST OFFICE HORIZON IT INQUIRY/PA
Well, language is just window-dressing, but there was a darker amorality, a symptom of terrible corporate ethics, at work. At one point Vennells angrily emailed her senior colleagues about Susan Crichton, the Post Office’s general counsel: “Susan was possibly more loyal to her professional conduct requirements and put her integrity as a lawyer above the interests of the business.” Which one would hope a lawyer would generally do. But as Brooks points out, “[Crichton] wasn’t as on-message as a Post Office lawyer was expected to be” and was replaced with “a more aggressive lawyer who agonised a bit less about his ‘professional conduct requirements’”.
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As Brooks observes, it was not only middle managers, bone-headed investigators and myopic self-satisfied technicians who were ethically rudderless, but also lawyers, “whose profession existed to serve justice [but] somehow subverted it into miscarriage of justice”. Many are named. Meanwhile, the priestly Vennells drew bonuses and discounted the possibility, later found to be a certainty, that her organisation was rife with dissimulation, self-serving persecutions and a keenness on forced confessions and searches-without-warrant. Even at the news of Martin Griffiths’s suicide in 2013 her reaction was to offer quick condolences, issue a demand to find out the innocent man’s mental health record, and dispatch her terrible sidekick Angela van den Bogerd to pay compensation to his widow and make her sign an NDA. To protect the Post Office brand.
Brooks is a Private Eye man but no idle laughing iconoclast: there is a deep seriousness in his analysis of the legal, corporate and political failings that led to this catastrophe. For sanity’s sake it helps to turn to his summary of things that actually did work. The law did, although it took Alan Bates to raise enough money for the suit that began to bring justice.
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Representative democracy helped: debates, questions and direct engagement with the leadership secured the independent scrutiny by Second Sight. Journalism did well: Computer Weekly, then Private Eye running with the story for years; also Nick Wallis, the freelance reporter who was struck by a cab driver’s story about his wife, the imprisoned Seema Misra. He persevered, sparking BBC radio and Panorama stories. A few brave individuals stand out: Bates himself, the campaigning pro bono barrister Paul Marshall, and Richard Roll, the former Futjitsu software man who risked his career by going public about the fact, furiously denied by both companies, that engineers could easily fiddle remotely with subpostmasters’ machines. It’s a bracing read, and my copy, heavily defaced with exclamation marks and startled rings, stays on the shelf.
Post Mortem: How the Post Office, the British Government and a Global IT Company Ruined the Lives of Thousands of Innocent People by Richard Brooks (Private Eye £10.99 pp240). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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