Abstract
Why did it take an ITV drama to make newspapers understand the huge public interest in the Post Office scandal?
It’s inane, The Sun political editor Harry Cole tweeted last month, all this chat about “why didn’t the papers cover the Horizon scandal before the telly drama?”. And here’s a chart showing all the hundreds of mentions in UK national titles “pre-Bates”.
Maybe he had a point. Gripping as it was, ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office revealed little that had not been known for years – presumably, because it had been so widely covered by all media. But look more closely and it becomes clear that most of what viewers already knew would have been thanks to Computer Weekly, from 2009, a freelance journalist called Nick Wallis, from 2010, and Private Eye, from 2011.
National newspapers, by contrast, had told us little. Before the TV dramatisation was aired, they had carried just two splash stories between them on a scandal that had been growing for nearly a quarter of a century (these were essentially the same story by the same author, published in two different titles 14 months apart, about how many people had died without seeing justice). In the two weeks after the series concluded, there were 39.
Cole’s tweet might have been buried under the avalanche, but his paper picked up the point the next day with a leader mocking people who “think they’re smart shunning the mainstream media and getting their ‘news’ from TikTok”. They had only themselves to blame if they hadn’t known about Horizon before. For years, it had been “covered extensively by The Sun and every major news outlet, along with magazines, TV and radio. Thousands of stories in all”.
Four days later, The Times was humming the same tune in its top leader, praising “dogged journalism” – without mentioning Private Eye – and citing the same numbers as Cole to demonstrate that the story had been covered “thousands of times”. Where did it get those figures? Surely, it hadn’t just spotted something a friend put up on the internet, swallowed it whole and then regurgitated it without checking? For that would be exactly the sort of practice that papers like The Times decry when urging readers to stick with “trusted” legacy media.
Those tweets and leaders all seem a bit defensive. And troubling. First, because Cole’s figures are suspect. Secondly, because it’s a bit naff, to say the least, to turn this scandal into an opportunity for self-promotion. And, finally, because it demonstrates complacency when a bit of self-examination might be in order. If all of our national papers had, indeed, given the story the sort of coverage claimed by The Sun and The Times, and still people didn’t take any notice, doesn’t it rather suggest that they have become irrelevant? Shouldn’t they be thinking about how to get their message across more effectively, rather than berating the public for not paying attention?
So let’s have a bit of a delve into those Harry Cole numbers. The chart he tweeted looks like a screengrab from a cuttings service widely used in newspaper offices. A search of that site using various keywords, including “Horizon”, “postmasters” and “IT system”, for the period January 1, 2009, to January 1, 2024, produces thousands of results, but “Post Office” and “computer” in combination generates numbers similar to Cole’s – 101 hits for The Sun, 387 for The Times against the 383 he quoted, 233 against 234 for the Telegraph titles – although the results for the Mail titles and The Guardian were wildly different.
The trouble is, though, that any search of this archive will throw up multiple results for the same story. This is because most newspapers have several editions – in The Times’s case London 1st, London 2nd, Ulster, Scot and Eire – and every version will be returned as a hit in its own right. The search will also turn up TV listings, readers’ letters and five-word pointers from one page to another, which can hardly be counted as part of a paper’s “coverage”.
The first 20 results for The Times covered just nine different items, with only two appearing once, while one story came up five times. The last 20 had nothing to do with the scandal at all; they were all articles that just happened to contain those key words. Scrolling down, it soon becomes clear that for a realistic total number of stories on a subject, you can safely divide the results figure by three or four. That would still leave the Times and Mail totals at around 100, but it’s a stretch to talk of “thousands” across the board.
The Times first woke up to the scandal in August 2015 – more than five years after Rebecca Thomson broke the story with her investigation for Computer Weekly – when it wrote about Jo Hamilton, courtesy of a Panorama report, Trouble at the Post Office. This was published as a 200-word top single on page 19. There was no follow-up. The paper went on to report in November 2018 that 500 postmasters were taking legal action that could cost the Post Office £1billion – in a 63-word nib. Again, there was no follow-up. When they won their case a year later, it told readers in a double-column piece on page 31 under the heading “‘Fraud’ case costs Post Office £58m”. It was all about the business, not the victims. Their story finally started to be told in 2021, when 39 had their convictions overturned.
After that, The Times picked up the pace. It ran five leaders, a big magazine spread and some 60 news stories, nearly half of those in the past year, with many of them by Tom Witherow. He was the author of those two splash stories – one for the Daily Mail and one for The Times, which he joined last year. But, no, it did not run 383 stories mentioning the scandal, as its leader claimed – not even a quarter as many.
Walk-on role in The Sun for Kate’s postmaster
The Sun, meanwhile, carried not 101 but 36 stories before the Mr Bates programme surfaced, and a couple more – including a spread on the real Jo Hamilton – shortly before it was broadcast. The scandal made the splash for the paper for the first and only time on the day it ran that leader in praise of the free press (which was also the day the number of stories the paper had carried this year passed the total of all those from the previous 15). It was about the Princess of Wales “standing by” one of the postmasters.
As it happens, The Sun had reported on “Kate’s postmaster” being prosecuted back in 2011 as part of its royal wedding extravaganza. Hasmukh Shingadia, who had been a guest at the wedding, was accused of false accounting. The story said he was due in court two weeks later. But the paper didn’t report that hearing, at which he pleaded guilty, or the one in July when he was given a suspended sentence, or the one almost exactly a decade later at which his conviction was overturned. Indeed, Sun readers never heard of him again – until the “Kate stood by me” story.
But it’s not quantity, but quality, that matters. And projection. We have seen that Kate was The Sun’s first Post Office scandal splash, but its “extensive coverage” probably had some big numbers back through the years before Mr Bates? Well, there were four inside news page leads – one published only in Scotland – and two op-eds. The Scottish one was headlined “PO cash scandal wrecked our lives”, which was based on victims’ evidence to the inquiry in Glasgow. That and the op-eds were the only articles the paper had carried that actually told any of the postmasters’ stories at any length. The pre-ITV coverage also included four columnists opining and three leaders. Apart from those, few stories ran to even 100 words and a couple of those were “doubles”, ie, the same story appearing in two sections – in this case, news and biz – of the same paper.
Perhaps the most telling find in this trawl through the archive was the second story to appear in the paper. This was a report of the class action judgment in December 2019, tucked away as a four-par panel at the foot of the City page under the headline “£58m ends row”. The text referred to a “long-running dispute” and a “mammoth series” of court hearings. Yet the paper had previously written only 63 words on this “long-running dispute” – on page 37 in August 2013 – and not a word (so far as I can find – please do correct me if I’m wrong) on the court cases. The news line was the cost to the Post Office. And “ends row”? We know how that one turned out.
If you took every story The Sun printed on the scandal before Mr Bates and transplanted them, complete with headlines and pictures, on to empty pages, they would not quite fill five. Now, imagine how many such pretend pages it would take to accommodate everything it has written about migrants, or the royals, or even Manchester City’s Kyle Walker.
Why Walker? Because he was all over The Sun’s front pages last month. The answer, if you include just his appearances in the news (rather than sport) pages from last August to this January, is 15. That’s three times as many in five months as the Post Office scandal got in 15 years. And if you go back to last March, he has been the subject of eight times as many splashes as the postmasters have ever been.
Essay subject for journalism students: define “extensive coverage”.
The aim of this little audit is not to suggest that The Sun or The Times were any worse than most of Fleet Street – or even that they did anything wrong. But if you’re going to brag about your “extensive coverage” and complain when people ask “What were the press doing while all this was going on?”, then you invite examination of your efforts. To suggest that you highlighted an issue because you ran four page leads, a collection of three-par stories and shouted from your leader column a couple of times – and then to tell readers that people didn’t realise what was happening because they were too busy looking at TikTok on their phones to pay attention to “real” news outlets – is plain bonkers.
The Daily Mail was even more self-aggrandising. It has certainly done more than the rest of Fleet Street over the years – and, unlike the Murdoch pair, was more interested from the word go in the people than in the Post Office – but did it do enough to warrant claiming at every big moment “It was us wot won it”?
The Mail knows all about campaigning, how to set it all up and then go bam! with all guns blazing on day one. Its anti-plastics effort from February 2008 is exemplary: splashes, op-eds, leaders, big name backers, case studies. Another tactic is to hammer the message home, day after day, splash after splash, as it did with Keir Starmer and “Beergate”, running seven lead stories on the trot.
Victory boasts leave postmasters with a bitter taste
We had none of this with Horizon – other than from Computer Weekly at the outset, when Rebecca Thomson had seven case studies ready to go before publishing her scoop. And in Private Eye’s special “Justice Lost in the Post”. And the TV and radio programmes (Radio 4 has broadcast The Great Post Office Trial three times).
The Daily Mail ran two or three spreads before the landmark civil action in 2018 and, later, regular stories from Tom Witherow. But was this a campaign? It didn’t find lawyers to take up the case. It didn’t get MPs – or anyone of influence – on board to ask questions of ministers, or of the Post Office, or of Fujitsu. Reporting on progress in a legal process doesn’t really constitute campaigning. Yet the headlines claimed “Our £58m victory”, “Victory for the Mail as postmasters cleared”, “Mail’s ten-year fight for justice”, the justification for these boasts being ragouts from stories that had all been printed way back in the book.
So much for the past. What’s going on now? Well, that show certainly jolted the press – and the politicians – into action. Rishi Sunak is to bring forward primary legislation to quash some 700 convictions and compensation has been promised.
“Justice!” cried the Daily Express. Is this justice? Lawyers and some postmasters are not so sure. Not because the promised compensation doesn’t begin to cover the real and emotional costs. Not because some guilty may be exonerated, and make money to boot. But because a blanket acquittal denies those individuals the right to say “I proved I was innocent”. And because it is a terrifying constitutional precedent for Parliament to start overturning decisions made in the courts.
While the Daily Express was celebrating Justice!, The Daily Telegraph took a different approach, coming up with an excellent splash: “Post Office handed out bonuses for convictions.” Investigators had been offered cash for every successful prosecution, with everyone on the security team “on a bonus”. This gem had, according to the Telegraph, “emerged”. It also “emerged” that Fujitsu had been awarded billions of pounds of government contracts since the courts ruled that its Horizon software was dodgy.
“Emerging” is journalese for what facts do when journalists finally start looking for them. Usually, after they’ve been in plain sight for ages. The bonus-for-convictions claims had been there for anyone who cared to look for at least a month before The Daily Telegraph picked up on them. They came in witness statements by former investigators who gave evidence to Sir Wyn Williams’s Post Office Horizon IT inquiry on December 7.
The Fujitsu contracts have been in the public domain all along. Even with coverage of the scandal gathering pace, the Sunday Express was alone in reporting last year that the Post Office had extended its contract for Horizon. As chancellor, Rishi Sunak acceded to a Post Office request two years ago that the government take on the burden of paying compensation to the victims, so he was well aware of the scandal and of Fujitsu’s part in it long before Mr Bates aired.
Yet during his time in 10 and 11 Downing Street, the company has won a further £3.6billion of government contracts. Meanwhile, his wife received more than £6million last year in dividends from her father’s company Infosys, which has been in partnership with Fujitsu since 2002. How much of that have we read in the national press?
Ministers say that attempts to block Fujitsu from further contracts had been stymied by procurement rules. So, did our newspapers, which have been busy accusing Sir Ed Davey of having been too easily fobbed off, explain these rules that led the government to give billions of pounds to a company it had no faith in? Did they even ask? The Times did in a Saturday essay, but it was a rhetorical question in a headline over a “new readers start here” history of the company’s role in the saga. It did not come up with an answer. The Guardian said people would indeed be asking that question, but again failed to answer it.
The FT did. It reported that after a legal tussle with the Blair administration over a failed IT system for the NHS, the Cameron coalition had tried to bar the company from future contracts, but government lawyers told them it would not be lawful to discriminate against any business on the basis of past performance. Blimey.
But back to those bribes for convictions. Investigators Gary Thomas and Mike Wilcox gave some pretty damning testimony to the Williams inquiry. There had been plenty of that over the previous five months in the fourth phase of the investigation – which ran from last July to the beginning of last month. But there was no one from the nationals there to hear them. They had paid little or no attention to the previous three phases either. If they can’t be bothered to staff up the Covid inquiry unless there’s a big-name witness, they’re hardly going to send reporters to the postmasters – or the contaminated blood hearings down the corridor.
They were out in force the next day, though, when the inquiry resumed its hearings for the first time since the airing of Mr Bates. Unluckily for Stephen Bradshaw. Had he not switched his date with the witness box from November, the world’s press wouldn’t have been there to hear Jacqueline McDonald describe him and his fellow investigators as “mafia gangsters”.
An embarrassing time for Sir Ed Davey
The blame game is now running at full pelt. Paula Vennells – guaranteed a full house for her appearance before the inquiry, whose next phase starts next month – has handed back her CBE, the chairman has been sacked, the director of communications has been suspended, and current chief executive Nick Read is having an uncomfortable time. The man described as the “chief architect” of the Horizon system is being hunted down. Fujitsu and its government contracts are under scrutiny: the company has decided not to bid for any more just now and has promised to chip in to the compensation fund.
And what of the people who were in power? It didn’t take long for the outrage to turn political. It’s an election year, after all. And everyone is gunning for Sir Ed Davey – who was just one of 17 ministers to have held responsibility for the Post Office since the Horizon system was installed in the late 1990s.
Like others, he was approached by Alan Bates’s Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance (JFSA) to look into the Horizon problems. While he did eventually become the first minister to meet Bates, he had previously rebuffed him, accepting the Post Office’s assurances that only a small number of people were affected. For this, he is now being pilloried. Because he is the leader of a party that has taken a number of Conservative seats in by-elections and is likely to take more before the year is out? Because of his habit of calling for the resignation of anyone in public life who fails to score 100 per cent on the successometer?
Some – The Daily Telegraph in particular – have also been trying to get Keir Starmer into the frame. These were private prosecutions, but some – possibly as many as a hundred – went through the CPS. And while overseeing some 750,000 prosecutions in his five years as DPP, Starmer must surely have taken a personal interest in giving the go-ahead for a case against a sub-postmaster suspected of having his fingers in the till. The terrorism and the murders and the rapes and the stabbings and the burglaries would all naturally be subordinate to such a crime in his list of priorities.
Is all this churlish? Probably. The claiming of undeserved credit sticks in the craw, especially as it took most of our newspapers an awful long time to climb aboard this juggernaut. But since they did, important information that had previously lain unnoticed in the JFSA archive, on the inquiry website, or in Nick Wallis’s blog has found a wider audience. Better late than never. More people are coming forward with new information. More “mainstream” journalists have started digging and, as Wallis generously says, this can only be a good thing.
Some had been on the case before, even if their publications never properly got to grips with the story. Like Tom Witherow. And The Guardian’s Marina Hyde, who wrote last summer: “It remains something of a downer that the most widespread injustice in British history doesn’t get the full-spectrum fever coverage.” We can safely say it has now.
