Investigator’s excuses lay bare the danger posed by petty persecutors

It’s always fashionable – and easy – to assume evil will come to your door, jackbooted and uniformed. In truth, evil more often comes about through the petty enforcement of the unimportant. It comes through a letter, or an investigation, or in this case, an email from a computer system.

Details of the horror of the Post Office scandal are now well known. The inevitable question raised in many minds was: “how”? Thursday gave a grim insight into the answer.

Former Post Office investigator Stephen Bradshaw – an irascible Scouser who’d inexplicably come dressed as an extra from Bugsy Malone – was being grilled by the Horizon inquiry. For one described as having a “heavy footprint” in the scandal, he seemed to know very little about it.

Bradshaw’s excuses mostly fell under the umbrella of “not my problem, guv’nor”. “All I do is interview, gather the information and send it off.” Bradshaw claimed to have simply signed off letters put in front of him by lawyers, without reading them first. Ah, the old “perjury” defence! Victims were jailed based on statements that coached witnesses didn’t actually write, all is forgiven!

The man shining a light under this particular paving slab of wickedness was inquiry Counsel Julian Blake. It might seem like this was a case of “fish in a barrel” but – as the Covid Inquiry shows – the wrong framing can lead to a tribunal becoming little more than a circus. By contrast, Blake’s cold, incisive and righteous anger was a much-needed reminder that, when freed from the inputs of the Twitterati experts, we can still do these things properly.

Blake wondered how Bradshaw had failed to heed numerous warnings about the software. Bradshaw replied: “I’m not technically minded.” Being a fraud inspector, you might think, is a job requiring some tech expertise, or even a morsel of suspicion about the computer system in question. You’d be wrong. (“I’m not pastry-minded, says bakery owner.”)

The investigators, like all poundshop Pol Pots, had evidently enjoyed their work, bringing dramatic flair to their interrogations of innocent postmasters. Bradshaw had accused one of producing “a pack of lies”, language the Counsel contemptuously described as being worthy of “a 1970s detective show”. The transcripts gave a uniquely chilling insight into what it must have felt like to be interviewed by these people, who ask questions knowing that absolutely nothing you say can affect the outcome. Imagine The Crucible with clipboards.

“We’ve got a choice of two things, haven’t we, Lisa?” one of Bradshaw’s colleagues had said. “Either you’re totally incompetent and you’re costing the Post Office three or four hundred pounds a week and therefore we can’t afford to keep you.”

“Don’t sack me.”

“Or you’re fiddling the pensions deliberately and pocketing the money.” “No, I haven’t got it, I haven’t.” Somehow, the investigators managed to sound simultaneously malicious and incompetent – as if

Bodger & Badger were running the Spanish Inquisition.

Of course, every bastard starts somewhere: in another job which provides training in the dark arts of petty persecution. Himmler was a chicken farmer, Stalin was a monk. We learnt that prior to working for the Post Office this man had been a TV licence investigation operative. Of course he had!

On and on, Bradshaw mumbled and spluttered through case study after case study of human misery – with the same sense of an empathy bypass. Doubtless he is merely the tip of a colossal iceberg, but there could be no better reminder that sometimes evil is most wicked in the hands of the administrators.

‘Prior to the Post Office this man had been a TV licence investigation operative. Of course he had!’