Mr Smith vs The Post Office

The other day I summoned up the courage to watch the ITV dramatisation of the Post Office Horizon scandal.  In the eleven months since its first screening I haven’t heard any suggestion that the drama was significantly inaccurate - I guess ITV’s lawyers will have done their due diligence.  

On one level, it was a superb piece of writing and direction, brilliantly acted: I won’t single out individual actors because they were all brilliant.  It’s a damn’ shame that despite Private Eye’s efforts over the years, it took a TV drama to lift the lid of this egregious can of worms, however, and Post Office management and HMG have blood on their hands such as would the multitudinous seas incarnadine.  The quotation invites comparison of Lady Macbeth and Paula Vennells, and I’ll leave it to others to draw the exact parallels, of which I suspect there are many.  I’ll allow myself one, though: at the most charitable interpretation, Vennells sleepwalked her way to the ruin of hundreds of lives and, oh, by the way, her reputation and that of the Post Office.

I’m struggling to get the story out of my mind.  Perhaps I shouldn’t.  At the time of the action, I was no longer an employee of the Post Office, but I remember the institutional hubris that pervades the script.  A frequently articulated mantra was that ‘the Post Office is a good employer’.  Then as during the scandal, there seemed to be no sense among senior management that the Post Office could do any wrong, but rather that the public should be grateful for its mediocre service.  The portrayal of the investigators and auditors seemed pretty accurate to me.  Some might say that the ID (Investigation Department) were always a bunch of thugs, and I’ve heard it said that it had a spectacular library of confiscated pornography.

By way of therapy, I did a spot of gardening yesterday, doing a pre-winter trim of some of the roses, and planting up some of the tubs out on the steps.  The hanging baskets are down now, and I have a few geranium and fuchsia cuttings in the sitooterie.  The cuttings I took of the New Guinea busy lizzies are starting to root well in water on the kitchen window ledge, so I’ll get them potted up in a week or so.  Storm Bert brought down a couple of sections of the fence and gave another few a distinct list to port, so we have our old friends from the fencing company coming round in a fortnight’s time to estimate.  Forget Christmas presents.