Unchecked power is the real Post Office villain

The Post Office scandal has all the character of an Ealing comedy, except that it is a tragedy. Like Passport to Pimlico or The Titfield Thunderbolt, it is a heart-warming story of recognisable British types combining to fight unaccountable power.

There is a moment in the ITV television drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, when Mr and Mrs Bates pin a map of Britain to the wall, seeking the most central location to bring together the victims of a problem which, they have already identified, spreads from Falkirk to Llandudno and Hampshire to Bridlington. (They pick the village hall in Fenny Compton, Warwickshire.) This is ordinary, decent Britain – which the Post Office used to symbolise – almost literally mapped out.

Unlike those Ealing-era films, however, this drama involves deaths before exoneration, at least four suicides, bankruptcies and a battle of nearly two decades. It is now clear that justice will win in the end, but when will that end come?

Ealing-comedy characters often represent class types. Posh persons take one of two forms – on the one hand, the pseudo-gentleman who tricks people with his polished manners; on the other, the genuine article with a social conscience and good bearing.

I am pleased that the politician to have emerged best from the story fulfils the latter archetype. I have known James Arbuthnot for more than 50 years. He was Captain of the School at Eton, noted for his dignified manner, unusual in one so young. I was his junior. Because I persistently committed the crime of playing passage football, he gave me the traditional punishment of writing out the shortest of Virgil’s Georgics (which is not short) in the original Latin. I remember the kindly gravity with which he pronounced sentence. The cliché “firm, but fair” comes to mind.

Arbuthnot then pursued a respected, though not glittering, political career. He was a minister, but never in the Cabinet. He was the chairman of the Commons Defence Committee for nine years. In 2009, as MP for North East Hampshire, he met jointly two subpostmasters in his constituency, Jo Hamilton (portrayed in the film by Monica Dolan) from South Warnborough and David Bristow from Odiham. He is sympathetically acted by Alex Jennings in the film, enjoying Mrs Hamilton’s cake in the Post Office café and highlighting her case on local TV.

The fact there were two of them convinced Arbuthnot that the problem might well be systemic, not individual. Perhaps the most consequential of his many interventions was to email all MPS to ask if they had encountered similar stories in their constituencies: eventually, suffering sub-postmasters from about 140 constituencies were identified. From then on, MPS of all parties became involved. Kevan Jones has probably been the most notable Labour participant.

Lord Arbuthnot, as he now is, has continued to pursue the story in its many iterations ever since, though he emphasises that it is the sheer stubbornness of Mr Bates which has made all the difference.

In the midst of so much misery, it is some comfort to say that the parliamentary aspect of the British constitution has done its work, although there are certainly some MPS who did culpably little. Under our system, MPS can get close to the real problems of constituents.

The constitutional faultline lies in the lack of accountability that government now allows in the running of many “arm’s-length” bodies such as the Post Office. Those in charge of such bodies appear to see their job as one where self-protection comes first. Currently, Paula Vennells, the chief executive for most of the period of scandals, has been identified for her mishandling and worse.

It is surprising that Tim Parker, the chairman from 2015 until 2022, when he stepped down just before the public inquiry into the scandal opened, has not received more attention. According to Lord Arbuthnot, Mr Parker’s handling of the litigation involved (he ran, too, the Post Office’s litigation sub-committee) was “atrocious”. He pursued Mr Bates, although he must have known that the Post Office and Fujitsu, the software suppliers, had remote access to the sub postmasters’ accounts and that therefore all their convictions must have been unsafe.

While at the Post Office, Mr Parker was also chairman of the National Trust. Under him, the charity began its semi-surreptitious introduction of policies designed to discredit some of its country houses, including Winston Churchill’s Chartwell, by making tendentious links with slavery and “colonialism”. When this blew up into a major crisis for the NT, Mr Parker was somehow not to be found.

Unusually for the boss of a company, Paula Vennells was an ordained minister of religion, an Anglican. She has now resigned from her godly duties, though not, it seems, from her holy orders.

Is it a good idea that the clergy should run big businesses? God and Mammon tend to clash. An even more extreme example was the Reverend Paul Flowers, a Methodist minister who was also chairman of the Co-op Bank when it collapsed in financial disarray. He was known as the “crystal Methodist” because of his fondness for illegal drugs. Then there is the Reverend Lord Green. No personal scandal attaches to him, but he combined his priestly life with being chairman of HSBC. He was criticised for failing to prevent his vast bank from assisting money-laundering and tax evasion.

I wish such virtuous characters had been around in the golden age of the Ealing comedy. We would have loved laughing at them.