Here you go:Our tiny magazine exposed the Post Office. They underestimated usTwo Computer Weekly journalists who were first alerted to the plight of sub-postmasters tell of 15 years of dogged work — and intimidationKatie GatensSunday January 14 2024, 12.43am, The Sunday TimesIn 2008, in a south London office block that her team shared with the trade publications Farmers Weekly and Flight International, 24-year-old Computer Weekly journalist Rebecca Thomson was handed a letter by her editor and told to investigate.It was from a sub-postmaster called Lee Castleton who had been told by the Post Office that he owed £27,000. It reminded her editor of another letter he had received four years previously from another sub-postmaster, Alan Bates.Their stories are familiar to us as the Post Office scandal, in which a glitch in the company’s Horizon accounting computer software led to thousands of sub-postmasters being wrongly blamed. Hundreds were convicted for false accounting and theft and many were made bankrupt.Then, however, they were just two men who claimed that something terrible, and incomprehensible, had happened. Thomson got to work, fitting the investigation around her day job writing business news stories for the website. “I was immediately drawn in — it sounded incredible,” she says. The work ended up consuming her for six months. “I remember thinking, this is really just the tip of the iceberg.”The ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office brought the struggle of the postmasters into the nation’s living rooms and back on to the floor of the Commons, resulting in legislation that should overturn all the wrongful convictions in one go.But it was Thomson, now 41, and Computer Weekly’s chief reporter, Karl Flinders, 51, who were the first to really take on the story. In 2010, Thomson left the title and Flinders took over reporting. He has since written 350 articles for Computer Weekly on the scandal. Theirs is the story of how a tiny trade publication of ten editorial staff exposed the biggest miscarriage of justice in the UK –– and persevered for 15 years.Thomson tracked down and spoke to seven postmasters for her initial article, including Bates and Castleton. She also found Jo Hamilton, who was spared prison after villagers raised the money for her, and Noel Thomas, who was sentenced to nine months in jail and spent his 60th birthday behind bars.But to her disappointment her investigation, published in 2009, didn’t have the desired effect. “I thought there’d be a much bigger reaction,” she says. “I thought people would look at it and say, clearly questions need to be answered.” “It’s really upsetting to hear someone say, ‘I’ve been diagnosed with a terrible illness and still they won’t give me any compensation’,” she says. “You start to feel guilty for putting them through it, especially if you feel like you’re not getting the results that you wish you were getting.”Computer Weekly had a small team of lawyers who they called on for that first article, but much of their reporting had to be scaled back for fear of being taken to court. The team were careful to strike out mentions of the Japanese tech firm Fujitsu, which created the software that led to the errors. “We had to be careful in that first piece, because we thought they might sue,” says Thomson. “It was hard to stay motivated especially because there were so many setbacks.”Although the initial articles did not get picked up by national publications, they provoked a furious response from the Post Office, which wrote to Computer Weekly editors, complaining about Thomson. “There was one phone call where someone just yelled at me, being really aggressive, trying to intimidate me,” says Thomson. When other publications would attempt to cover the story, the Post Office would denounce Computer Weekly’s reporting as inaccurate, which Thomson says was successful at squashing the story.Flinders wrote to Thomson in 2011 to ask whether he could continue reporting on the Post Office scandal using her article as a foundation, and she gave him her blessing. He promised to keep her updated.He says the subject appealed to him because, “I like supporting the underdog against powerful institutions.” He saw how aggressive the Post Office had been with Thomson. “I thought, ‘They must be hiding something here.’”Over the years, Flinders amassed hundreds of contacts and a wealth of information. “I had so much information which I couldn’t publish because I couldn’t stand it up.”He describes the process as a frustrating game of cat and mouse. Computer Weekly would put an allegation to the Post Office and it would come back with a carefully worded statement from a team of lawyers which denied that sub-postmasters had lost money.Many times Flinders asked the Post Office if it was investigating reports of flaws in the Horizon software alleged by an ever-growing number of sub-postmasters. “They didn’t seem to be,” says Flinders. “In hindsight, we know now it was because they knew about it.”In 2011, Reed Business Information, a US publisher, sold Computer Weekly to TechTarget, an American company, and the magazine was left without access to lawyers, meaning the editorial team had to make their own judgment on what they could and could not publish.Flinders says being a small trade publication worked in many ways to his advantage. “Did they underestimate us? Yeah I think they did,” says Flinders. He says that in the years when there was not much progress made by Bates and his campaigners, often the Post Office did not even respond to his emails asking for comment on what he was writing. “I’d sneak things in — but there was no backlash. I realised they weren’t challenging anything I was writing, so I could be a bit riskier,” he says.Flinders says that initial attempts by the Post Office to scare the Computer Weekly team spurred him on to produce more articles. He pushed the boundaries, calling Bates for tips and producing a steady stream of articles over the years.Things gathered pace in 2015 when he was sent a threatening letter from the Post Office’s General Counsel challenging him on minor points in a story he had written. “From that moment on, I was really angry. I wrote so many stories that year,” he says.The real credit, say both, goes to Bates. Flinders says the campaigner has driven so much of the reporting, a lot of which people do not know about. “He provides documents, he gives you contacts, I speak to him sometimes multiple times a day on the phone,” says Flinders. “It’s rare that somebody does as much research as he does — he’s got every document you can imagine in his attic. I don’t like to take credit, I’m just doing my job.”Thomson and Flinders point out the story has highlighted the incredible reporting done by trade magazines, many of which are folding or cutting highly knowledgeable staff. “The contact and trust is unparalleled,” says Thomson. “It’s an area of the industry that can be a bit forgotten about and mocked.”Now their journalism is finally being recognised after 15 years, both reporters say the Post Office scandal is the story that will define their careers. Flinders says, “There’s not many bigger stories than this. It’s our Watergate, isn’t it?”
Richard Carter ● 104d