Post Office accounting drama is a tale of human costs

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Two months ago, ITV thought it had found a way to hijack the UK’s national political conversation: pay arch-Brexiter Nigel Farage £1.5mn to appear on the reality show I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here. In the end, that stunt fizzled.

But now, Britain’s second most watched broadcaster has managed to change the political debate through a more unlikely, and cost-effective, route: a drama series about postal service accounting.

Mr Bates vs the Post Office recounts how hundreds of men and women running branches of the service were wrongly accused of theft owing to flaws in an IT system.

Since the first episode broadcast on January 1, the story of injustice has hooked audiences and led politicians from all parties to demand swifter justice.

The show’s success says much about the British public’s elevated sense of fair play. But its depiction of an institution corrupted by outsourcing and corporate hierarchies has also resonated with the mood of national malaise.

The Post Office is one of many names, including electricity providers and sewage companies, accused of having turned into faceless, unfeeling profit-maximisers. Like many things in 2024’s Britain, it just hasn’t seemed to work.

By contrast, the show’s hero, retired sub-postmaster Alan Bates, is shown to be an honest amateur — who chuckles that his fight for justice is “a hobby that got out of hand”. He is a fan of woolly jumpers, warm beer and wet Welsh hills. He is a worthy successor to the last star of a hit show about Britain’s postal service: Postman Pat.

The first episode of Mr Bates was watched live by more than 3.6mn people, beating rival shows. It has delivered the kind of David vs Goliath battle that this year’s football FA Cup has notably failed to produce. More than 1.2mn people have signed a petition to strip the former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells of her CBE. Bowing to popular pressure, she announced on Tuesday that she was handing back the honour.

Yet its impact is jarring, given that the Post Office scandal has been well known for years. Journalists at Computer Weekly and Private Eye exposed questions about the Horizon IT system, operated by Japan’s Fujitsu, more than a decade ago. Other media, including the Financial Times, have covered it in depth. The courts have already quashed some sub-postmasters’ criminal convictions. A multi-stage public inquiry is due to resume this week, although compensation for sub-postmasters and criminal charges against the Post Office have been slow to materialise.

Perhaps a story about IT systems needed primetime drama to interest a mass audience. On screen, it is not a tale of accounting but of human costs. Precisely because the story has been extensively reported, the drama could take sides, showing the injustice as a fact.

Its reception may have been helped by the lull in news stories after the Christmas break: politicians have to watch something during the parliamentary recess. And perhaps Conservative MPs, unable to agree on much substantive legislation, saw a cause that they could rally behind.

Indeed, one counterintuitive aspect of Mr Bates is how Conservative MPs are shown. While the party trails heavily in the polls, the show favourably depicts James Arbuthnot, then MP for North East Hampshire, for taking up the sub-postmasters’ cause. (“Who knew a Tory MP could be so nice?” remarks one of the campaigners.) Nadhim Zahawi, who had to resign as chancellor last year over his tax affairs, appears in Mr Bates as himself and shines by asking duly tough questions of Vennells.

The show does make some disparaging references to the British state, which owns the Post Office. But that state is not so much a dark, controlling force as a quagmire. The sub-postmasters were victims of: a contractor’s faulty IT system, a legal quirk where the Post Office could prosecute without involving the police or the Crown Prosecution Service, some unsympathetic judges, and a legal system that made fighting impossibly expensive.

Within a week of the show airing, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said that compensation payouts should be sped up. Justice secretary Alex Chalk has urgently looked for ways of quashing more convictions. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, who was a junior minister for postal affairs between 2010 and 2012, has expressed his regret, saying he was lied to by the Post Office.

For ITV, which, like other public-service broadcasters, is trying to prove its relevance in a world of streaming, such waves are very welcome. Netflix and Apple may offer documentaries about the billion-dollar losses of global tech powerhouses — it is hard to see them investing in Mr Bates, a show that shocks with its mundaneness. At one point, a cash loss of £9,148.22 flashes on a sub-postmaster’s screen. Four-figure discrepancies were all it took for upstanding local businesspeople to be driven to court, bankruptcy and even suicide.

“I just want to be able to take you on holiday again,” Mr Bates tells his partner at one point. “You know, a proper holiday. Abroad, not just camping.” Ultimately, that sentiment proved far more relatable than Farage’s desire for fame in the jungle.