Postmastergate: Britain’s Dreyfus case exposes the failure of elites and legacy parties

“They didn’t realise they were playing with my life, a mum’s life, a wife’s life. Even someone with a heart of steel wouldn’t do that. They cannot be human, and yet they kept doing it. The bosses are still free, they have their families, while I was in prison.”

Those words of Seema Misra, a sub-postmistress wrongly accused of stealing £74,000 by the Post Office, sent to prison in 2010, on her son’s tenth birthday while pregnant with her second child, locked up with inmates who included Rose West and terrified by the other prisoners (she discovered the body of a suicide while in custody), are both an indictment and a microcosm of our failed justice system, our corrupt political establishment and the self-serving “elites” who control every institution, public and private, covering up their incompetence at the expense of the despised little people.

Though completely innocent, Mrs Misra’s conviction was aggressively pursued by the Post Office. Emails revealed by a public inquiry, written by senior Post Office lawyer Jarnail Singh, boasted of how her case had been “an unprecedented attack on the Horizon [IT] system”, rejoicing that “Through the hard work of everyone… we were able to destroy to the criminal standard of proof every suggestion made by the defence.” Dave Smith, managing director at Post Office Branch Accounting, applauded Mrs Misra’s imprisonment as “brilliant news”.

Around the time that Post Office bosses and their expensive lawyers were celebrating this brilliant news, Seema Misra was undergoing the humiliating process of admission to the largest women’s prison in Europe, learning not to make eye contact with other inmates and being placed on suicide watch. She later claimed the only reason she did not take her own life was because of the child she was carrying.

Her case was totemic for the Post Office, for the reason given by Jarnail Singh: it was seen as a test case for asserting the integrity of the Horizon IT system used for Post Office accounting, a computer system designed by Fujitsu. As long ago as 1996, International Computers Ltd (rebranded in 2002 as Fujitsu, its Japanese owner) began producing Horizon, a computer accounting system, for the Post Office and the Department of Social Security, to integrate social security payments through Post Office branches. The DSS rejected the system, but the Blair government procured it for the Post Office.

As early as 1999, Horizon was detected falsely reporting financial discrepancies at some Post Office branches. Incredibly, the Post Office management insisted the system was “robust”. So, far from sub-postmasters surreptitiously extracting cash, it was they who repeatedly raised the alarm about the system’s unreliability. One such early whistleblower was Lee Castleton, who bought a post office in Bridlington, East Yorkshire in 2003. By 2004, having called the Post Office helpline 91 times to complain that the Horizon IT system was faulty, the computer showed a £25,000 shortfall in his accounts.

Instead of launching a major overhaul of Horizon, the Post Office prosecuted Castleton who, unable to afford a lawyer, unsuccessfully defended himself: He was ordered to repay the £25,000 plus costs of £321,000, which bankrupted him. The Post Office then embarked on a consistent policy of aggressively prosecuting all sub-postmasters whose accounts showed discrepancies. Altogether, 736 sub-postmasters were prosecuted and around 450 – an average of 30 per year between 2000 and 2014 – were imprisoned

The Post Office’s tactics were to tell every postmaster who either complained or was found to have incorrect accounts: “You’re the only one having a problem.” Employees on their helpline were instructed to tell this lie. In this way, intimidated individuals became convinced their case was unique. Often postmasters were persuaded to plead guilty to false accounting, although they were innocent, to avoid criminal prosecution for theft. Alan Bates, hero of the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, detected duplicated transactions on his Horizon system as early as 2000, but lost his £60,000 investment when he and the Post Office parted company in 2003. 

Bates reported his suspicions about Horizon to the journal Computer Weekly in 2004 and by 2009 enough evidence had been collected to publish it. That same year, a small group of sub-postmasters, including Bates, formed the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) to take on the Post Office and secure justice. That was the scale on which the Horizon system was known to be compromised – a year before Seema Misra was jailed. Between 2009 and 2018 Computer Weekly published 70 stories about Horizon, so its deficiencies were common knowledge among the IT community.

It seems indisputable that the Post Office, throughout, acted in bad faith. As early as 2003, a judge in a case where the Post Office was suing a sub-postmistress ordered the Post Office to employ an IT expert to investigate Horizon – something any responsible institution would have done years before. When the IT inspector raised serious concerns, the “delusional” Post Office told him he was mistaken, but abandoned the case against the sub-postmistress. Yet it continued to prosecute others, boasting of deterring sub-postmasters from “jumping on the Horizon-bashing bandwagon”.

As the language employed by Jarnail Singh regarding the Misra case (“an unprecedented attack on the Horizon system”) betrays, the Post Office had fetishized the Horizon IT as something between a virility symbol and a Maginot Line, which it defended fanatically.

By 2012, with MPs asking questions, the Post Office commissioned the forensic accountancy company Second Sight to investigate cases. To its dismay, Second Sight’s interim report in 2013 expressed serious concerns about the system. In 2015, before Second Sight’s full report, which now found there was a real possibility of serious miscarriages of justice, the Post Office stopped Second Sight’s work and closed the mediation scheme it had opened.

This provoked a group action by 555 former sub-postmasters – Bates and others versus Post Office – in the High Court. Even then the Post Office had the arrogance to attempt to force the managing judge, Peter Fraser, to recuse himself, an application that was rejected. The claimants were awarded £58m in compensation, but after legal costs, that left just £11m among 555 victims. But the verdict gave all the unjustly convicted sub-postmasters grounds to appeal their convictions.

That sequence of events could not leave any intelligent person in doubt that the Post Office authorities knew, virtually from the beginning, that the Horizon system was flawed. Yet, rather than admit that problem and commission a major overhaul or incur the expense of switching to a different system, they ruthlessly destroyed hundreds of lives. It was a classic example of a large institution trampling on the little people, but in this instance the little people hit back.

Yet behind the skulduggery, the swaggering expensive lawyers, the chutzpah of highly remunerated executives lies a lunar landscape of human misery. Totally innocent people lost their reputations in their local communities and often their freedom. Marriages foundered, bankruptcies proliferated, health deteriorated, some died prematurely, their lives wrecked, at least four took their own lives. Pillars of the community were felled without remorse to support the cover-up of highly paid incompetents in a public utility. 

Terrified Seema Misra, cowering among the most violent women in Britain, fearful of losing her life or her baby, was just collateral damage to the elites passing through the Post Office en route to even larger remunerations and honours. 

Paula Vennells, chief executive of the Post Office from 2012 until 2019, earning nearly £5m in that post, continued the prosecutions. In the same year that the Post Office was ordered to pay £58m to sub-postmasters, Vennells was awarded the CBE. What for? The award was another instance of the rule prevailing in contemporary Britain: nothing succeeds like failure. In her final year at the Post Office her remuneration amounted to £717,500, more than half of which was in “performance-related bonuses”. She surrendered her honour this week, after a petition to the Honours Forfeiture Committee passed a million signatures.

Then there was Angela van den Bogerd, Post Office director in charge of responding to complaints about Horizon from 2010 onwards, “a vibrant, collaborative and engaging business leader”, in her own modest LinkedIn self-description. Mr Justice Peter Fraser, in the High Court, took a different view, stating that she had a “disregard for factual accuracy”.

Or Adam Crozier, chief executive of Royal Mail when it still oversaw the Post Office, on whose watch the prosecutions began, now chairman of BT on a basic salary of £700,000. Who says there are no happy endings in this story? 

Above all, there was Sir Ed Davey, Postal Affairs Minister from May 2010 to February 2012 – the epicentre of the crisis. The Horizon scandal was already leaking into the public domain by the time Davey took office. 

In May, 2010, Alan Bates requested a meeting with him, which, considering the growing concern among MPs, any responsible minister would have acceded to. Instead, Davey wrote Bates a short note saying a meeting would not serve “any useful purpose”. They did meet later, but Bates described the government attitude as “disappointing”. Davey subsequently went on to earn £275,000 as a consultant to Herbert Smith Freehills, a legal firm that had represented the Post Office.

Sir Ed Davey’s hobby since – like all Liberal Democrat leaders, he tends to have a lot of free time on his hands – is calling for other people to resign: he has made such calls 31 times since 2019. Now is the time for him to set an example by himself resigning; the equally attractive alternative is that he stays on as Lib Dem leader and acts as a voter repellent to his absurd party. 

One of the interesting characteristics of the Post Office scandal is that it equally implicates all three legacy parties, since the obstructive tactics of the Post Office and the complicit behaviour of ministers has caused it to drag on for a quarter of a century, spanning administrations of all stripes. It is a metaphor for contemporary Britain: clowns and incompetents covering up at the expense of decent, innocent people. Like a grisly totem, the Horizon system, which was producing incorrect data at the end of the 20^th century, is still in service at the Post Office.

If anyone were inclined to doubt the voluminous evidence that the Post Office knew all along that Horizon was a disaster, but callously ruined many lives in denial of that reality, they should consider the plain common-sense analysis. Over its long history, since 1660, Post Office officials occasionally succumbed to the temptation to steal; but such crimes accounted for only a small proportion of employees.

The National Association of SubPostmasters (NASP) has 6,727 members. During the Post Office purge, more than 900 were accused of misconduct, though only 736 were prosecuted. Did it not occur to anyone that, in an organisation whose members were traditionally regarded as pillars of the community, a ratio of one sub-postmaster in seven turning to crime – and, as more and more were sacked, fined or jailed, the offences proliferating in spite of these severe deterrents – was not a credible situation?

That such a notion could be entertained – and fiercely acted upon – reflects the lack of contact with reality prevailing among the establishment. This case is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history – it is Britain’s Dreyfus Case – and people have forfeited their lives and freedom through its instrumentality. The Post Office must be stripped of its privilege of launching prosecutions, having shown itself completely unfit to exercise such a power.

This outrage must finally end the longstanding convention of non-accountability by the elites. Those culpably responsible must go to prison, as they sent Seema Misra to a nightmare destination. Obstruction must be swept aside, convictions reversed and serious money paid in compensation. Alan Bates declined the offer of an OBE on the grounds it would be unfitting while Paula Vennells retained her CBE. That obstacle has been removed. 

There is a rank stench of dissolution about the current political system and social order. “Change and decay in all around I see.” The Post Office scandal is emblematic of that moribundity. It is significant of our somnambulist society that, after more than two decades, public anger was eventually ignited by a television drama: it took virtual reality to validate real life. Every institution in Britain – Parliament, the NHS, the banks, the universities, big business – is ailing, corrupt and distrusted. We are heading for a radical reordering of politics and society, and the Post Office scandal, like lockdown, an object lesson in how the elites will trample on ordinary people when it serves their interests, is an appropriate prelude to the coming insurgency. 

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