Mr Bates vs The Post Office: Inside Episode 2
The four-part dramatization of the British Post Office scandal continues unpacking the staggering injustices done to UK Subpostmasters. In Episode 2, the postal workers find allies in Parliament, but must convince an independent investigator their stories are true. Read along to get more context and particulars on events like the union representative’s visit to Fujitsu, politicians becoming involved, and the Post Office CEO’s phone call to Alan Bates. [Contains spoilers.]
- 1.
How did Members of Parliament Become Involved?
In Episode 2, we see Jo Hamilton’s district MP visit her shop to learn more about her struggles. Turns out she wasn’t the only Subpostmaster to tell her story to government officials.
Members of Parliament had been contacted by individual Subpostmasters since Horizon’s introduction, but it was after the 2009 Computer Weekly article and the formation of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance that a more substantial campaign was formed by MPs. A group of them were involved in real life, though James Arbuthnot had a lead role. Kevan Jones MP also campaigned for years and was present at many early meetings.
And Lord Arbuthnot did, indeed, meet with Jo Hamilton in her local shop. “He was just a thoroughly decent guy,” she says in the documentary The Real Story of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which will air on MASTERPIECE on Sunday, April 28th at 11pm ET and again on Sunday, May 5th at 7pm ET. Arbuthnot also appears in the doc, saying, “The good thing about being an MP is, if you contact someone like the chairman of the Post Office, and say, I’d like to meet you to talk this through, they tend to respond.”
- 2.
What happened at the Union Rep's Fujitsu Visit?
Michael Rudkin comes to a Fenny Compton gathering in Episode 2 and is introduced as a former representative of the National Federation of Subpostmasters (NFSP). He tells his peers they’re up against both the Post Office and the multinational company Fujitsu. As such, he doesn’t think fighting will do any good.
The real Michael Rudkin went to Fujitsu in 2008 as part of an NFSP working group hoping to improve the money exchange processes used in post office branches—not to investigate Horizon shortfalls. But “during his visit,” reports Computer Weekly, “a Fujitsu employee demonstrated how he could make changes to Subpostmaster branch accounts remotely, without the Subpostmaster knowing.”
Literally the next morning, Post Office officials paid Rudkin a visit. “What came as an even greater shock [than the Fujitsu experience], was that auditors came into my bedroom at 8:30, sat on the edge of my bed and said, ‘You’ve got a £44,000 shortage,” Rudkins says in The Real Story of Mr Bates vs The Post Office. His wife was convicted, given 300 hours of community service, and electronically tagged for six months.
- 3.
Who was the Investigator from Second Sight?
In Episode 2, Post Office CEO Paula Vennells meets with James Arbuthnot MP and says she’s ready to fund an independent review of the Horizon software situation. Bob Rutherford from Second Sight is hired to begin an investigation.
When Second Sight was hired in real life to look into branch shortfalls, two forensic accounts were on the case, a Ron Warmington and an Ian Henderson. Their initial findings were publicly released in 2013 and included the statement that the Post Office and its audit teams “have an asset-recovery or prosecution bias and fail to seek the root cause of reported [hardware] problems.”
The Post Office “commissioned their own investigation [which] showed there were terrible problems,” series writer Gwyneth Hughes tells the MASTERPIECE Studio podcast. “And to such an extent that the investigators switched sides, went to work with the postmasters because what they found [had] shocked them so much.”
- 4.
Did Paula Vennells Call Alan Bates Directly?
At the end of Episode 2, Post Office CEO Paula Vennells personally calls Alan Bates. “Where do we go from here?” she says. The dramatized phone conversation about moving on to mediation is as Alan Bates remembers it—it was one of a few occasions when he had direct access to Vennells.
Bates tells The Huffington Post (UK) that he met with Vennells in person “over the years” to rectify the crisis, but that she repeatedly “just took the company line, she just defended the company left, right, and center. It was all about the brand.”
