The thankless life of a Post Office mistress

One of the fascinating aspects of the Horizon Post Office scandal is the way that the sub-post masters and mistresses who were victims of the bungling or maybe malevolent Post Office management, are represented as a class. They seem to sum up the qualities that used to be thought of as quintessentially English: honest, respectable, truthful, yet quiet and reluctant to make a fuss – even when they suffered a monstrous mass injustice.

Their suffering in near silence is one reason why it has taken so long for the scandal to break through into public consciousness. Perhaps from a misplaced sense of shame, many of the unjustly accused sub-post masters and mistresses preferred to settle the false claims made against them out of court – often reducing themselves to penury in the process. Some of them even pleaded guilty to thefts they never committed, rather than organise as a pressure group to make their case loud and clear.

That is why it took the determined efforts of a single individual – sub-post master Alan Bates, hero of the eponymous ITV series as played by Toby Jones – to start moving the dial.