The Great Post Office Scandal

The Great Post Office Scandal is the extraordinary story behind the recent ITV drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It tells of how thousands of subpostmasters were accused of theft and false accounting on the back of evidence from Horizon, the flawed computer system designed by Fujitsu, and how a group of them, led by Alan Bates, took their fight to the High Court. Their eventual victory in court vindicated their claims about the defects of the software and exposed the heavy handed attempts by the Post Office to suppress them. The book also recounts how successive senior managers, business leaders, lawyers, civil servants and Government ministers, at best failed to expose the injustice or, even worse, sought to cover it up, resulting in one of the largest miscarriages of justice in UK history. The author, Nick Wallis, is a journalist and broadcaster who has been reporting on the scandal for over ten years and who acted as script consultant on Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama that brought the affair into the national consciousness.As the public inquiry reaches its climax, and senior figures such as Paula Vennells come to be questioned, The Great Post Office Scandal reveals the full scale of what happened and how so many of our trusted institutions allowed the saga to go on for nearly a quarter of a century, shattering the lives of thousands of innocent people.

Auteur

Nick Wallis is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. His work on the Post Office story has been published by Private Eye and broadcast on The One Show and two Panorama specials. He also wrote and presented the Radio 4 series - The Great Post Office Trial - which was repeated in 2021 to coincide with the Court of Appeal's decision.

Texte du rabat

The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

Résumé
The Great Post Office Scandal is the story of how these innocent people had their lives ruined by a once-loved national institution and how, against overwhelming odds, they fought back to clear their names.