The Post Office must lose the right to police itself

Editorial: Anyone watching the Horizon scandal inquiry – now being broadcast daily, gavel to gavel – will see that the days of the service’s dedicated detectives are well and truly over

(Dave Brown)

Another highly unexpected – but highly welcome – consequence of the ITV dramatisation of the Post Office/Horizon scandal is that the previously little-noticed proceedings of the statutory inquiry are now carried live, gavel to gavel, to a global audience.

The inquiry, chaired by retired judge Sir Wyn Williams, has been quietly and methodically going about its supremely important work since 2021, carrying forward and strengthening its remit from a previous independent inquiry. Now, the cross-examination of a single investigator from the Post Office’s security department has been given about the same media prominence as that given to the appearances of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak at the Covid-19 inquiry.

This is as it should be, if only as an attempt by the media and officialdom to make up for previous neglect. What befell innocent subpostmasters and subpostmistresses over a period of two decades is, after all, the widest miscarriage of justice in British history, and those thousands of people who have had their lives destroyed, and even ended, in this disgraceful episode deserve the maximum disclosure of their actual, truthful innocence.