“I just want to be able to take you on holiday, Suzanne.” Toby Jones sits on a wooden bench outside a small cottage in rural Wales. Wearing a woolly jumper, he holds a clutch of papers in one hand and fiddles with his glasses in the other. “A proper holiday, abroad. Not just… camping.” He squints at the landscape of Snowdonia before him, his great, rippling brow furrowed. “The Post Office took all our money,” his wife replies. “You can’t possibly go on holiday. You’re too busy campaigning, morning, noon and night.” As Alan Bates, the former sub-postmaster who exposed the Post Office scandal after years of activism, Jones is masterful: suspended between resignation and determination, full of quiet pain and resolve. It’s a performance that has had dramatic, unexpected cultural impact: his is the face that launched a million petition signatures.
Mr Bates vs The Post Office turns what the Criminal Cases Review Commission has called the “most widespread miscarriage of justice” it has ever seen into a deeply human drama, and in doing so has turned the nation’s attention to the scandal, making it a bigger story than ever before. Between 1999 and 2015 dozens of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office – and in some cases convicted – of false accounting, fraud and theft, resulting in the loss of jobs, debt, bankruptcy, imprisonment and even multiple suicides. This chain reaction of ordinary suffering is unfathomable – both hard to believe, and hard to follow. The obfuscating technical details that allowed the Post Office to insist on such starkly unjust outcomes create an obstacle for the storyteller, who has to write a compelling narrative using an obscure lexicon: subpostmasters, shortfalls, “systemic issues with the computer system”, investigating accountants, group action, statutory inquiries.
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