Like so many others I spent my evenings last week gripped and appalled in equal measure by the superb ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
As we all now know it told the shocking true-life story of how The Post Office spent years hounding, persecuting and accusing thousands of perfectly innocent sub-postmasters of theft or false accounting to cover up the inadequacies of Horizon its not-fit-for-purpose computer accounting system.
Many loyal and honest employees lost their jobs, their homes, their life savings and their reputations. Hundreds were prosecuted and even jailed for crimes they had never committed. Sadly some, broken by the experience, took their own lives.
It was a story that has been told countless times over the past 20 years by victims of this dreadful moral failure and catastrophic miscarriage of justice but for some reason no one was really listening. It has taken a television drama, admittedly a very good one, to bring it to widespread public attention.
People have been terribly shocked by the brutal, callous and completely unfair treatment of these blameless workers by the Post Office and suddenly after years of paying scant attention to the scandal journalists and politicians are demanding answers and action.
Mr Bates vs The Post Office has provided a unbelievably effective wake-up call by highlighting this horrifying example of the kind of corporate tunnel vision that can drive institutions like The Post office to crush anyone who stands in their way threatens their reputation.
Within days of the broadcast members of the Cabinet including the Prime Minister were condemning the entire chapter of events that lead so many innocent people losing their good names, their jobs, their homes and in some cases even their lives. There were calls for the Post Office to be blocked from its role as prosecutor, for all the outstanding convictions to be quashed and for former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells to be stripped of her CBE
The docudrama style play had focussed on the dogged determination of one of the wrongly accused sub-postmasters, Alan Bates, who simply refused to be bullied and the two long decades he had soentbsupporting the victims and leading them in the seemingly impossible battle that would eventually clear their names.
With the peerless Toby Jones as Bates it brought the terrible behaviour of the Post Office to a massive audience. Perhaps it caught the zeitgeist, arriving at a time when people are uniquely fed up with broken Britain, appalled by corporate bully boys and ineffectual politicians and desperate for those prepared to hold truth to power.
The unfeeling actions of the Post Office and those who drove its savage face-saving campaign horrified them and it took a dramatised version of this log and shameful episode to make clear just how awful it really was.
NOTE: Earlier today (9th January 2024) Paula Vennells confirmed that she is handing back her CBE.
