The joys of the wireless

Obviously, one’s first instinct is to agree that parliament should step in and decree that all the hundreds of sub-postmasters convicted in the Post Office scandal should be exonerated without their appeals needing to be heard. But I suspect that instinct is wrong, for at least two reasons. The first is the precedent. These are individual criminal cases (though with strong common characteristics). If parliament feels it can interfere with such cases, it is usurping the process of law. Once MPs feel they can decide questions of individual guilt, where’s the end to it? Politicians cannot judge evidence to a legal standard. Justice will become politicised. The political proclamation of unproved innocence could be almost as noxious as that of unproved guilt. Think, for example, of what might happen to past terrorist cases in Northern Ireland. The second reason is that the sub-postmasters themselves deserve individual consideration of their claims. It should be established with proper evidence that their convictions were unsafe so that the world can see exactly how they were wronged. The problem with the existing appeals procedure is its slowness, justice delayed being justice denied. The hunt should start for justice speeded up, but still properly delivered.

Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the drama that has captured the public imagination, was made by ITV. Why not the BBC? It is the sort of thing it used to be good at. I wonder why they did not make it. I suggest a comparable drama about past wrongs revealed after many years of corporate cover-up. It would concern how Martin Bashir obtained and manipulated his 1995 television interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, how one of the ‘little people’ – Matt Wiessler – was pushed out after mocking up bank statements, and how the big people, one of whom went on to run the corporation, contributed to what had happened.