“THIS is the story of a national scandal.” So began The Great Post Office Trial: Nowhere Near Over on Radio 4 on Tuesday, Nick Wallis’s latest report on the scandal that has blighted thousands of lives and still is even now, long after the Post Office has accepted that it was in the wrong.

Back at the turn of the century the Post Office installed a new computer network into its 19,000 branches. The Horizon IT scheme was deeply flawed but rather than question the software, the Post Office went after its own sub-postmasters. Between 2000 and 2013 hundreds of innocent employees were prosecuted. 

Wendy Buffrey was one of them. She was convicted of false accounting in October 2010. Talking to Wallis, Buffrey admitted she was so crushed by the situation that she even considered taking her own life. “And that would have been it, the pain would have been finished and done.”

But as she was preparing to do just that she got a call from another sub-postmaster who had also been convicted of false accounting. Buffrey suddenly realised that she was not alone.

“If that phone call hadn’t come,” she admitted, “I would have been another one of the statistics.”

 

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And the stats are grim. Tragically, four of those convicted have taken their own lives. A further 60 have died before receiving compensation. 

Some 86 of the convictions have now been successfully challenged. Not that that is necessarily the end of it. Two years on from her own conviction being overturned Wendy Buffrey is still waiting for compensation. 

What emerged in this programme was a damning portrait of the Post Office, an organisation that is quicker to pay its bosses than those it treated so abysmally. 

“The Post Office is an institution in which mendacity and lack of identifiable principle run through it like a stick of rock,” Paul Marshall, a barrister who has been representing some of the affected subpostmasters suggested. 

Wallis has been impressively dogged in pursuit of this story over the years. This is what good journalism can do - stand up for the powerless.

But there are limits to what it can achieve. “Why has no one been held to account?” Wallis asked at one point. 

Is it because we live in a country that protects those at the top? The families who lost loved ones at Hillsborough and the Grenfell fire might agree. And that should be a national scandal too.

The death of former Scotland manager Craig Brown on Monday brought an understandable outpouring of tributes over the airwaves this week. On Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland on Tuesday morning ex-Celtic, Hibs, Hearts and Dundee United striker Darren Jackson, was clearly emotional about the loss when he spoke about his former gaffer.

What emerged was a portrait of a kind, funny, genuinely decent man, but one who, perhaps despite his public image, was maybe stronger than he was sometimes given credit for.

Richard Foster, Brown’s captain at Aberdeen, told Good Morning Scotland listeners that Brown had once advised him, “Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness.”

Jackson, meanwhile, repeated the famous story that Paul Lambert had also told on 5 Live’s Drive the previous evening. When Scotland were getting ready to play Brazil at France ’98, Brown had told his players, “Guys, I’ve just seen Brazil holding hands. They’re s******* themselves.”

It’s a great line and a funny story, but 5 Live Sport on Monday night added a bit of context by playing a recording of the man responsible telling the story himself. It began with Brown praising the great Brazilian manager Carlos Alberto Parreira and explaining the tradition behind why the Brazilians actually held hands going out onto the pitch, before delivering his sweary bon mot to lighten the mood in the Scottish dressing room.

At which point John Collins, one of those paying tribute to Brown for 5 Live and who played for Scotland in that game against Brazil in 1998, piped up: “I was in that dressing room when he came in and said that famous sentence. And the boys just looked at each other and thought, ‘I bet they are.’”

 

Listen Out For: Open Country, Radio 4, Thursday, 3pm

A new series of Radio 4’s rural magazine show returns with Dougie Vipond paying a visit to the River Tay to discover the river’s link to Shakespeare.