Elementary lesson from the Post Office scandal

THE stories of innocent postmasters and postmistresses, ruined, humiliated and, in many cases, led off to prison when they had done nothing wrong, makes me want to hit something every time I hear it.

I am filled with admiration for those who worked for years to expose this dreadful scandal, and relieved for our society that the victims are at least being vindicated. But the pain and unjust shame endured by those caught in this horror is too appalling to think about.

I do not know what punishment, or penance would be right for the executives responsible. I know that they have not experienced it.

But I think it is one of many horrible things that probably could not have happened so easily in an older Britain. I think we have become too gullible, too ready to accept the official version of everything. And a key reason for that is that nobody reads the Sherlock Holmes stories any more. I ask around friends and colleagues, and they just haven’t and don’t.

I wonder if it was the idiotic pastiche TV version, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which finally destroyed the real Holmes in the national mind. People thought they knew who he was, a sort of magical genius, Doctor Who in a deerstalker, and never bothered to find out the much more interesting truth. For the whole point of Holmes was that he was a doubter, a dissenter, one of the awkward squad, who did not believe the official version of anything. And the next point of him was that he actually did believe in thinking and the power of reason. His usual reward for this was the astonished scorn of the official police. How lucky we were to have such a figure as a sort of national hero. What a pity that he no longer is.

How often he would find a tiny, crucial clue, and his astonished companion Dr Watson would say to him: ‘How did you do that?’ And Holmes would reply: ‘Because I was looking for it.’ I have made that a sort of motto in my own work. If you are not credulous, you will soon work out where to search for such clues. It is not difficult. But you have to think it is important.