Beyond the Horizon

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. The Post Office scandal — a long-running tragedy and miscarriage of justice — has become suddenly and significantly politically salient following a powerful drama by the UK’s second most-watched broadcaster, ITV. It might yet result in resignations in the ruling Conservatives, the Labour opposition and the Liberal Democrats.

Some thoughts on how the Post Office scandal went mainstream and what it tells us about the importance of national broadcasters below.

Notes on a scandal

The UK’s Post Office scandal has caught the imagination of the British public following a brilliant, hard-hitting drama by ITV, Mr Bates Vs The Post Office.

Paula Vennells, the Post Office’s chief executive between 2012 and 2019, will hand back her CBE following a public outcry over the scandal, which saw more than 700 sub-postmasters prosecuted by the Post Office because of faults in its IT system. The row might yet take on a political dimension: as the FT’s Westminster team reveals, Fujitsu, the company that provided the faulty IT system, received government contracts under Rishi Sunak’s watch even after the 2019 court judgment against the Horizon system. Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, was Post Office minister for the first two years of the coalition government and Pat McFadden, Keir Starmer’s election chief, held the same job under Gordon Brown.

What’s striking about the political row is that the Post Office scandal is an old and well-covered story, including by the FT. I wrote about it for the i, after a friend gave me Nick Wallis’s brilliant and angering book, The Great Post Office Scandal, as a birthday present. Since reading Wallis’s book, I’ve keenly followed Tom Witherow’s extensive coverage of the scandal, first at the Mail and latterly at The Times. The story was initially broken by Computer Weekly and Private Eye, while there is an ongoing, judge-led inquiry into the scandal.

But for all the coverage on this story, it did not seem to have the breakthrough it deserved. The nationwide revulsion that the lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street or the Windrush scandal inspired was wholly absent.

But ITV’s excellent drama seems to have succeeded where a number of journalists had failed in turning a national scandal into a national talking point. More than 9.2mn people have watched ITV’s drama, and more than 1mn signed a petition calling for Vennells to be stripped of her CBE since it aired.

I think Henry is right to note that, for all the undoubted strengths of the global streamers, this distinctly British story was unlikely to be given this treatment by Apple or Netflix: it took ITV to do it.

One reason why TV drama matters as a topic of cultural conversation is precisely the power of fictionalised entertainment to capture the public mood and shift the political conversation in a way that factual reporting can’t. ITV’s Post Office drama is part of a long history of politically significant drama going as far back as 1966’s BBC drama Cathy Come Home.

But something worth worrying about, I think, is this. While there is no doubt in my mind that in 10 years’ time there will be a high-quality trade publication for IT professionals such as Computer Weekly, investigative journalists such as Nick Wallis and Tom Witherow, and certainly there will be an FT. But I am less certain there will be a national broadcaster, whether the BBC or ITV, that is able to capture the national imagination and the country’s attention in the same way that Mr Bates Vs The Post Office has done. The UK, like essentially every country in the world not called North Korea, is becoming a place with a more diverse and more fragmented media. That is great for consumer choice, given that we can all pick and choose what to watch and enjoy. But it also reduces the ability of programme makers to give a national scandal the prominence it deserves, as ITV has done with the Post Office scandal.

Now try this

As I wrote yesterday, I went to see The Boy and the Heron again last night, this time with the English dub. I’m not a hard and fast “always pick the subtitles over the dub” person as far as films are concerned: ultimately both subtitles and voiceover work involve tough decisions about translation and interpretation. But in this instance, while Robert Pattinson, much to my surprise, is a truly brilliant bit of casting in the role of the heron, the film is much better enjoyed with subtitles than with dubbing. Do go and see it if you can.

Another very good film in cinemas at the moment is Anyone But You, a delightful romcom based on my favourite Shakespeare comedy Much Ado About Nothing.

There will be questions about both culture and politics at the first in-person Inside Politics event — a quiz in London on January 31. Sign up here. (If it is successful, we hope to do more in various places, including this mythical “outside London” I hear so much about, but please do come along if you can.)

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