The Great Post Office Trial · BBC Radio 4

11. The Reckoning

June 1, 2021·28 min·1 clip

Harjinder Bhuttoi was told £208,000 was missing and arrested — he served over three years in prison for a crime that never happened.

Ten years after the host's first BBC report, the scandal reaches the Court of Appeal. The host starts with Seema Misra and Jo Hamilton, then turns to 23 April, when 39 former sub-postmasters had convictions quashed. What begins as a human story becomes a paper trail. The Clarke advice emerges as a document that, in one legal view, should have gone to general counsel and the board. Legal privilege makes disclosure messier, but the guest still says wider circulation would have been expected, especially with a government representative on the Post Office board. The answer lands cold: departments that did not speak properly to one another, even when criminal convictions were at stake. Ron Warmington is blunt. Second Sight had been hired to investigate Horizon independently and had been promised full cooperation, but the Clarke advice and review were not given to his firm. His comparison is severe. He says he had only seen similar behaviour while dealing with truly evil criminal organisations, especially the instinct to protect a brand while people remained harmed. James Arbuthnot brings the political weight. He recalls negotiating with the Post Office in good faith in 2013, then deciding that good faith had not been returned. His charge gets plainer from there: cover-up, perverting the course of justice, misleading Parliament, and a total loss of trust. The host then asks how the Post Office kept dismissing media reports, Second Sight and campaigning sub-postmasters after 2014, despite knowing some prosecutions were unsafe. Names are read into the record. By the end, the question is bigger than quashed convictions. How did the legal system, government and society let it go on for so long?

As heard by us

A serious chapter that turns legal detail and testimony into a public reckoning.

Episode 11 treats the Post Office Horizon scandal as a reckoning, returning to Seema Misra and Jo Hamilton before widening out to the quashed convictions and the damage that followed.

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Why you'd press play

For the moment the Post Office story stops being history and starts becoming accountability.

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