Even in death the victims of the Post Office scandal face injustice

Question

 

IT is never easy to watch a grown man cry but Rab Thomson's tears, at least, were wept in relief rather than sorrow.

He was on the phone to his sister, telling her his 2006 conviction in the Post Office IT scandal had just been quashed.

The 64-year-old's voice was all over the place. I struggled to decipher everything. The man was in bits. Watching the report on the BBC news, I was welling up too.

The former sub-postmaster left his house to walk his dog in the streets of his hometown.

A huge weight off his shoulders now; his head held high. There goes an innocent man.




Wrongly convicted postmaster William Quarm with his wife Anne

The scene was particularly poignant because facing the outside world was something his late mother Margaret found increasingly difficult to do in her final years.

She had run the post office in Cambus near Alloa before her son took it over and his wrongful conviction left her broken.

She couldn't bear people thinking her son was a crook, so she stayed inside.

‘I went one day to see mum and I found her dead,' Mr Thomson said in a 2022 interview.

‘I blame myself to this day for losing her - she did not want anything to go wrong with the family.' 

He said this week he hoped she was looking down on her family now and knew that the wrong had at last been righted.

Yet, even as he celebrated, another Scottish family left heartbroken by this most gargantuan miscarriage of justice suffered a fresh twist of the knife.

I had imagined we were by now firmly in the realms of reparations.

It came far too late - and was accelerated only because an ITV drama punched the baleful reality of the scandal through to people's living rooms - but a healing process appeared to have begun.

There was an acceptance, or so it seemed, of the appalling wounds visited upon blameless men and women accused of embezzlement by obdurate managers who put more faith in a defective computer system than they did in their own employees.

But the evidence of a former Post Office investigator at the Horizon IT inquiry this week makes me question just how well the lessons have been learned.

Raymond Grant was one of the people who made William Quarm's life a misery 15 years ago.

In his wretchedness the former postmaster from North Uist contemplated suicide.

Bullied and humiliated over missing thousands for which he could not account (how do you account for an IT system which makes money disappear when your bosses regard its computations as gospel?) he saw his reputation trashed.

As his widow Anne told me last year, he was left with a dismal choice: admit his ‘crime' and hope for a lenient sentence or deny it and go to trial and thereafter, almost certainly, to jail.

Mrs Quarm is haunted by the memory of her husband - a highly respected member of his island community - reduced to packing a small bag before each of his court appearances.

It was in case he was destined to spend that night in prison.

The sentence ultimately imposed on him was a community service order which stripped him of his dignity.

Imagine losing your job and being forced to do menial work to repay a debt to society you did not owe.

Not long afterward, the father of five was diagnosed with colon cancer and declined rapidly.

He died in March 2012, a few weeks before his 70th birthday. Mr Quarm is one of many victims in this tale of dire failure in corporate governance who did not survive to see justice.

His name was, however, cleared posthumously. His widow dedicated herself to that as she promised him she would in his dying days.

It was the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh that ruled last year it was all a mistake.

More than a decade after he went to the grave, the stain on his character was finally removed.

On Wednesday an embittered Mr Grant sought to throw more mud at it.

He told the inquiry - which he appeared at only under threat of legal action - that he still believed Mr Quarm was guilty.

Further, he maintained, he was unaware of any concerns about the reliability of the Horizon computer system at the time of his investigation into Mr Quarm.

His position of plausible deniability may have been tenable were it not for the evidence lead counsel to the inquiry Jason Beer held in his hand which proved Mr Grant was aware of concerns about the system as far back as 2002.

He had complained then about the Post Office help desk telling people the Horizon system was faulty.




Post Office investigator Raymond Grant giving evidence to the Post Office Inquiry

Why was this a problem, he was asked? ‘It was bringing the integrity of the Horizon system into question at a very early stage of its inception,' said Mr Grant.

I despair at the logic. More egregious still is the fact it is offered in 2024 after so many lives have been ruined.

Between 2000 and 2014, more than 700 postmasters and postmistresses across the UK were accused of theft, fraud and false accounting.

Why did it happen? Because people sharing the mindset of Mr Grant were more concerned about preserving the integrity of a bit of IT kit than they were about the integrity of honest employees.

It remains utterly astonishing that no one put their foot on the ball at an early stage and asked themselves whether this was really credible - that vast numbers of staff had suddenly become criminals just as a new IT system was introduced.

It is flabbergasting that investigators like Mr Grant lacked the gumption to see the picture in the round and reach the obvious conclusion.

It's so bewildering I struggle to believe it happened - and yet if it didn't happen that way the only other explanation is worse: that they knew perfectly well their IT system was a disaster and blamed the innocent anyway.

In fairness to Mr Grant, investigating is probably not his forte.

He is a former postman with no legal training.

He was made redundant by the Post Office in 2009 and, by his own account, has been too busy lately to look in detail at the documents sent to him in advance of his witness appearance.

His testimony ended with a tearful apology in which he said the Post Office had deceived him and ‘an awful lot more people'. 

‘I just hope that people do learn from this and are more honest in the future.'

For my money there is much learning still to do on his part. William Quarm, the innocent man he pursued, is dead.

His widow seeks only peace now after Scotland's highest court cleared his name.

Mr Grant's role in securing his false conviction cannot be undone but it can, at least, be regretted and regarded years down the line with humility.

Mistakes happen, but only through acknowledging them can we move on.

‘In my mind, cuchillo huusk Experience I still think Mr Quarm had a role to play in the loss of the money,' says Mr Grant.

In my mind, his attitude sums up the whole problem - presumption of guilt, tunnel vision and arrogance.

It's what brought us here and we see it still.


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