Chris Mason: Justice at last, but many questions still remain

This time last week, the ITV drama about the Post Office scandal had not yet finished.

And now the government has announced changes to the law that will have major constitutional, political, practical and financial implications.

After years of the wheels of justice grinding like ice, the wheels of politics suddenly spun.

What we are seeing is almost unprecedented.

Westminster is interfering with the independent decisions of the courts.

And all this after a generation of failures, starting with a state institution, the Post Office, three political parties, and a Japanese technology company, Fujitsu.

why? Because this TV drama, in its direction, casting, and timing, managed to capture something that it claimed captured the public’s mood and ultimately the government’s attention.

One minister told me that watching the series with his family over the holidays had raised pointed questions and demands to know what he was going to do about it.

That, multiplied by a million, helps explain this seemingly transformative moment for those who have spent years seeking justice.

Many have been disappointed for a long time.

So the breadth of the questions and the range of people facing them is considerable.

There are people in the Labor Party who were ministers in the 1990s, and now they can trace their own records and the government’s records and see how they acted, what they did, what they said, who they met. I remember.

There are former Liberal Democratic Party ministers from the coalition government, as well as Conservative Party ministers.

But since this is an election year, the people facing the biggest questions are the most prominent political figures who held other important positions during this scandal.

As a result, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey faces questions about his tenure as Posts Minister, one of more than a dozen people to hold the post during the scandal.

Questions were also asked of Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer.

As Sir Keir frequently reminds people, he was Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales from 2008 to 2013, heading up the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

The CPS’s role in prosecuting subpostmasters was minimal, as most were private prosecutions brought by the Post Office.

Three lawsuits were brought against people who ran the Post Office during the time Sir Keir ran the organization.

Labor claimed these cases were never brought to his attention and that during his five years in charge the CPS oversaw a total of four million cases.

Some have put questions to the Prime Minister and Rishi Sunak when he was Chancellor.

Delays in compensation, a new government contract for Fujitsu, and criticism from some former postmaster generals that the compensation currently on offer is inadequate.

Campaigners say government after government has failed, just like the Post Office and Fujitsu.

It’s a lot of questions for a lot of people, and there will always be a lot of questions.

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