The enquiry into the immoral behaviour of the Post Office caused outrage following ITV’s broadcast of Mr Bates Versus the Post Office. Unfortunately, in the age of the Internet and social media, moral outrage is merely a commodity whose value is linked to page views and reposts on Twitter. The danger is, as John Naughton warned in a recent article in The Observer, after the dog has barked, and the caravan moved on, defrauded and imprisoned postmasters will find themselves at the back of the queue behind victims from previous scandals such as the Grenfell Tower fire and Windrush, still waiting for justice and compensation.
When the enquiry into the Post Office scandal began last autumn those following it on YouTube were largely limited to its victims and those who spent almost twenty years campaigning on their behalf. ITV’s drama changed that, and the enquiry gained the sort of coverage enjoyed by the BBC’s reality TV series ‘Traitors.’ As objectionable as they appear, one feels a certain amount of sympathy for members of the Post Office special investigations team. Had they testified a month ago few would have known about the heavy-handed tactics they employed to extract confessions from innocent postmasters. Instead, they have become almost as notorious as the Kray twins were in the 1960s and have their faces splashed across the pages of tabloid newspapers alongside those of the actors who depicted them in the television series. However, one wonders what, if anything, our booing of villains and cheering of heroes will achieve because the Horizon scandal rather than a one-off drama is just one episode in a box set of scandals.
Timing is everything and one reason interest in The Post Office enquiry has exceeded the average attention span of the British media is it having spilled over into the year of the forthcoming general election. As members from all three political parties have either been in charge of the Post Office or campaigned on behalf of postmasters (at least now claim to have done so) here was a chance to weaponise the scandal.
There has been something rather troubling about the switching between actors and the real-life victims they portrayed in ITV’s drama. Has the Post Office Enquiry morphed into reality TV? Will it be forgotten as we all become immersed in Traitors or even the next, seemingly inevitable, scandal.
Helping to ease the passage of this scandal into history is a social media which generates more light than heat: enough light to blind us but too little heat to start a fire. Even so, no government should rely on this always being the case.