Eton head boy who took on Whitehall’s ‘nothing to do with me, guv’ merchants and became the sub-postmasters’ unlikely champion
Hollywood scriptwriters wouldn’t get James Arbuthnot. lord Arbuthnot of Edrom is the parliamentarian who for years campaigned for victims of the Post office Horizon scandal.
Time and again, he seized hold of their case and battled whitehall and westminster’s ‘ nothing to do with me, guv’ merchants. Time and again, the system refused to yield.
But hang on. This pukka Tory peer himself seems the very embodiment of the British Establishment. with a drawl as dry as dead twigs, he was head boy at Eton, became a london barrister and defence procurement minister in the Major government. He was a Conservative chief whip and, back when he still had a full(ish) head of hair, was tipped as a future PM.
Now he has helped bring about the political equivalent of dunkirk, rescuing hundreds of so- called little people – if the brave sub-postmasters led by Alan Bates will forgive that expression – from the merciless maw of big bureaucracy. lord Arbuthnot is counter-intuition made flesh. Perhaps it was always going to be that way. only Nixon could go to China.
Maybe only a posh, phlegmatic, cigarillowisp insider with a High Court judge for a wife (Mrs Justice Arbuthnot, daughter of the wine expert Michael Broadbent) was going to conquer the inertia of unthinking officialdom and its apologists in the courts.
Arbuthnot was still in the Commons, MP for the safe Tory seat of North East Hampshire, when he first heard about ‘this horrific saga’ of sub-postmasters being falsely convicted of fraud.
In the 1990s the Post office had spent millions on a whizz-bang Fujitsu computer system called Horizon. It was the era of modernisation at all costs. Computers were always right, even when they were wrong.
when thousands of pounds started ‘ disappearing’ from Post office accounts, no one blamed the computer. Instead, they blamed the decent, entrepreneurial souls who ran small post offices. Boot-boy corporate investigators got stuck in. Sub-postmasters were sent to prison. As we now know, it was all quite wrong. DAvId Bristow, postmaster at odiham in Arbuthnot’s constituency, contacted his MP and ‘said he had a problem’ after being accused of losing £40,000 of Post office money. Mr Bristow suspected there were gremlins in the Horizon accounting system.
A postmistress in neighbouring South warnborough, Jo Hamilton, thought the same but she had been convicted of false accounting. Instinct told Arbuthnot something was amiss. ‘They were both transparently honest people,’ he recalls, looking back on his first meeting with the duo.
Among other things, this scandal illustrates the virtues of our parliamentary model of government, in which elected representatives have constituencies small enough for them to engage personally with electors. Face-to-face meetings matter. If only Sir Ed davey, the lib dem leader who, as Post office minister, tried to brush off Mr Bates, had taken that view.
Jo Hamilton had, under pressure from prosecutors, pleaded guilty. An appeal against her conviction was therefore not possible. But when Mr Bristow’s replacement postmaster in odiham was also removed for a similar reason, Arbuthnot smelled a rodent.
As he this week told the Hansard Society’s Parliament Matters podcast: ‘I thought: “This is absurd, it can’t be a coincidence. It must be something systemically wrong with the accounting system”.’
A succession of ministers – over the years he dealt with 17, from the Blair government onwards – tried to fob him off. Their civil servants were telling them it wasn’t their problem and ministers opted for an easy life. officials insisted that there was an ‘arm’s length’ arrangement with the Post office which prevented ministerial intervention in contractual details.
‘Nothing to do with us,’ murmurs Arbuthnot, ‘is a model which I think is profoundly dangerous.’
In his Hansard Society interview he used the analogy of a dangerous dog. Its owner cannot declare an ‘arm’s length’ principle after the dog bites someone.
‘you’ve got to take responsibility of ownership. Ministers are constitutionally responsible. They own this damn thing.’
This damn thing: lord Arbuthnot is ineffably patrician. His father was Scots gentry, the family tracing its links to James v of Scotland and prospering in tea plantations and the Army.
John Arbuthnot fought through the 1939-45 war with the Royal Artillery, became Conservative MP for dover in 1950, and was made a baronet on account of his political service and his expertise in military explosives. The old boy was good at blowing things up, a skill his second son arguably inherited. James’s mother was keen on music. And bulldogs.
The young Arbuthnot’s contemporaries at Eton included the maverick mercenary Simon Mann and a future daily Telegraph editor, Charles Moore, who recalls that Arbuthnot had a dignified bearing ‘unusual in one so young’.
As captain of school he was ‘firm but fair’. In 1975, he was called to the Bar as a tax barrister but soon immersed himself in borough politics. In 1987 he landed the plum parliamentary seat of wanstead and woodford. After boundary changes he switched, in 1997, to North East Hampshire. His parliamentary
career had a tricky start when his new secretary, a pugnacious spinster, complained that Arbuthnot had issued a list of 32 tasks she should consider part of her job, from doing tax returns for his nanny to organising his car repairs.
Newspapers wrote him up as a languid version of Rik Mayall’s satirical MP, Alan B’Stard. In those days there was certainly no shortage of money in the Arbuthnot household. He lost half a million pounds in the lloyd’s insurance scandal but was still wealthy
enough to buy a pile in Hampshire. As an orator in the Commons chamber he was seldom anything more than solid. His skills, if he had any, seemed to lie more in backroom fixing.
After a long stint in charge of the Commons defence committee, he took a lobbying job with the arms firm Thales and accepted a seat in the lords. To the casual eye, Arbuthnot probably looked just another politician who looked after numero uno and defended the Establishment.
This was not the full story. He had already shown some campaigning determination over the 1994 Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter crash, in which 29 died.
A verdict of gross negligence was passed on the dead crew but Arbuthnot and others forced a rethink. Technical problems had been concealed. As in the Post office scandal, humans had been slow, either from dimness or pigheadedness, to accept that machines might be at fault.
It takes determination, and perhaps a certain serene self- confidence, to overturn such attitudes. during his fight with the Establishment, Arbuthnot wrote to his fellow MPs, the Speakers of both parliamentary houses, countless officials and lawyers and accountants.
BECAUSE he was a seemingly paid-up member of the governing class, he managed to open doors. He organised meetings. He suggested to parliamentary committee chairmen, even when they were in a rival party, how to cover themselves with glory by helping his campaign. He says he came to ‘revere’ the talismanic Mr Bates, and the wronged postmasters, in turn, came to hold Arbuthnot in the highest regard.
Finally, the oil-tanker of state started to turn. Finally, Arbuthnot’s years of pestering and determined but deft ‘word in your ear, dear boy’ cajoling achieved the seemingly impossible acceptance of wrongs done.
Groupthink was abandoned. Some stinking judicial mistakes are now to be rectified. All thanks to a grandee with a feather-light gait and impeccable manners. He is a most unlikely liberator.
‘MPs have a duty to do things on behalf of their constituents,’ he murmurs. ‘ Even though I’m now 71, in essence I’m a small boy who cannot stand unfairness and I can’t and won’t stop with this until I’ve done my best to see it right.’