Now ITV’s Post Office drama is over, the self-serving blame game kicks off

The public outcry about the Post Office accounting scandal, sparked by an ITV miniseries, has forced MPs to speed up the pursuit of justice for hundreds of wrongly convicted post office managers – but they haven’t missed the opportunity to fling mud at their opponents, says Sean O’Grady

Monica Dolan as subpostmistress Jo Hamilton in ITV’s hit drama ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’ (ITV)

Human nature being what it is, it was inevitable that the long-running Post Office/Horizon IT scandal – once it had been highlighted by a powerful TV miniseries – was going to be weaponised for party political purposes. And so now, a great blame game has come to pass.

Since Mr Bates vs The Post Office was shown on ITV last week, the scandal of the faulty accounting software – which, for some 16 years after its rollout in 1999, was responsible for criminalising hundreds of innocent post office managers, many of whom were sent to jail – has been thoroughly weaponised for electoral gain.

And it’s a dispiriting spectacle. Every politician, eagerly assisted by their allies in the press, wants to dump some disgrace and obloquy upon their opponents. The public is angry, the thinking goes, so why not make them angry with a political enemy?