Post Office Horizon scandal: Innocent North Uist sub-postmaster Bill Quarm died a broken man. His widow still hasn’t been compensated – Murray MacLeòid

Anne Quarm and her late husband Bill ‘lost everything’ because of the Post Office Horizon scandal

I feel as if I must be one of the few people left in the UK who has not actually seen Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama which has finally forced the politicians and authorities to act with the urgency and pathos that the issue demanded, but which was ignored for so long by far too many.

Given the recent media exposure, I feel as if I’m acquainted well enough with the script as is, although I doubt this will mean that, whenever I finally get round to sitting down and making my way through its painful four episodes, it will mean my sense of anger, like all those who have already watched the programme, is any less acute.

Toby Jones, who plays the main part of Alan Bates, is a fine British actor, full of subtlety and sympathy, even in the comedy roles he plays. So, I’m looking forward to it, if that’s not too inappropriate a phrase. It’s television and dramatists working at their finest, able to influence public policy by highlighting human injustice. Nothing sharpens the senses of politicians quite like a mass outpouring of anger.

John Hollingworth as James Hartley and Toby Jones as Alan Bates in a scene from the ITV show Mr Bates vs The Post Office (Picture: ITV)

And there were certainly plenty of stories to choose from – literally hundreds throughout the UK. That’s a lot of people, many of whom would have previously been upstanding members of their community, who had their reputation tarnished by an organisation which, maddeningly, could not accept the failings of technology and believed them all to be fraudsters. Hopefully, the inquiry will be able to shed light on quite why they acted like tyrants. As an aside, as we rush headlong to embrace the world of artificial intelligence, there is a salutary lesson to be learned here.

The immense human cost

While the ITV adaptation of the story of Mr Bates, the founder of the Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance, helped expose the matter to the masses, for long years individuals and families suffered in silence, their lives ruined, their savings blown in paying back money they were never guilty of taking in the first place, fighting legal cases that never should have seen the light of day.

And when it happens to someone close to you, it must be all the more infuriating. In a BBC interview this week, Anne Quarm, whose husband was one of those accused and one of only four in Scotland to have had their convictions quashed so far, spoke movingly of the cost – not just financial, but more so, the human cost.

Bill Quarm ran the post office in Bayhead, North Uist, before being accused of stealing thousands of pounds. I did not know him personally but I know plenty who did and no one that I know believed him guilty. He died in 2012, his spirit broken by the weight of the accusations. His story is one of those the UK inquiry will focus on.

“It was just awful to see him how he was,” said Anne in the BBC interview, which is still available on BBC iPlayer and well worth a watch. “It broke his health, it nearly broke mine. We lost everything.”

She is still to receive a penny in compensation.