Part Vindicated

Estelle is a Teaching Assistant at Swanvale Halt infants school; she has family history with the Post Office and when our sub-postmaster was caught up within the scandal which has finally made headlines a decade after it should have done she first took an interest, then raised a petition, then began working with Nick Wallis, the journalist who has pursued the case as it has made its way through progressively less obscure corners of the media and finally the courts (and who, it turns out, is the son-in-law of one of the Lamford churchwardens - it's a small world!). Estelle was outside the High Court a day ago to hear 39 sub-postmasters have their convictions for fraud and theft overturned. There is something deeply moving about these utterly ordinary people winning a victory against an institution which has been for so long apparently above the law, which has distorted and suppressed information, and which has lied so massively and shockingly to its employees, to official investigators, and to the Parliament to which it is in theory accountable. At last the media is referring to the Post Office scandal as what it is: the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

How was it, exactly, that Post Office Ltd managed to convince itself - if it did - that reality was something entirely different from what they claimed? How could Fujitsu, the company that devised the fatal Horizon accounting system, keep so silent throughout this whole event? Why did court after court never notice or comment on the apparent irregularity of a single institution being both complainant and investigator? I heard a former Conservative business minister on the radio yesterday regretting that she had never paid more attention to this matter while she was in office; why didn't she? Why did a succession of government ministers in both Labour and Tory administrations simply turn aside from the rising tide of complaints and claim they couldn't do anything? When our Swanvale Halt Post Office was closed, I wrote to doyenne-of-the-Corbynites Rebecca Long-Bailey as Labour business spokesperson to complain, and didn't get so much as an automatic email from her office (our own Tory MP was more forthcoming). Was everyone just scared?

Last year, as the original trial relating to Horizon was reaching its conclusion and Mr Justice Fraser issued what must be one of the most damning judgements ever laid down against a public corporation, Estelle was trying to find out the legal basis for the governance of Post Office Ltd. Discovering that as what is technically referred to as an 'Arms-Length Body' - a corporation which is not formally part of Government but related to it - it should be governed by a 'Framework Document' which lays out its precise relationship with civil servants and ministers, Estelle put in a Freedom of Information Request to see the document. At first she was sent irrelevant papers, and then was stonewalled by civil servants. Finally the Business Department admitted that there wasn't one. There was, in effect, nothing that described how Post Office Ltd should be run. This, presumably, was what allowed it to act as though it wasn't subject to the law and which made Government ministers so reluctant to tackle it.

Forget Mr Johnson and his text messages, or even his wallpaper: if there is not a public inquiry into these events it will be a dreadful shame: there are so many questions that need answering.