The scale of the scandal is scarcely believable: Between 1999 and 2015, at least 800 post office managers in the UK were unjustly accused of fraud by their employer, the Post Office, a public company. They were convicted of theft and, in 236 cases, even imprisoned, because of a faulty cash register program called Horizon developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu. It was deployed in the UK's 11,500 post offices from the late 1990s.

Using this new Horizon system, office managers kept finding that the software was showing negative balances in their accounts. Many found themselves thousands of pounds overdrawn, suggesting that they hadn't declared all their earnings. As they were operating under franchise contracts, this obliged them to make up these deficits themselves. Instead of collecting their complaints against Horizon, the British Post Office took these individual postmasters and postmistresses to court, unwilling to hear anything about their distress or potential bugs, assuring them that the software was "robust."

Until now, the sufferings of these poor people and their families, disgraced and ruined, had been met with relative indifference from the media and politicians on all sides, with the exception of a few MPs and specialist newspapers, including Private Eye and Computer Weekly. In March 2022, Le Monde interviewed several of these victims, who were desperately hoping to be cleared one day. And no one, either at Fujitsu or in the hierarchy of the Post Office – an ancient institution, previously highly respected in the UK – had been held accountable.

It took the broadcast of the ITV mini-series Mr Bates versus The Post Office in early January, tracing the relentless fight for the truth by a handful of postmasters and postmistresses, including Alan Bates (played with impressive empathy by actor Toby Jones), one of the leaders of the victims' associations, to awaken public opinion. The first of the four episodes was watched by 9.2 million people, a huge audience success.

Since then, the Conservative government has launched a series of initiatives to make up for lost time and repair what the tabloids have suddenly discovered to be "one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Britain's history." The deeply apologetic Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated on Wednesday, January 10, that "People who worked hard to serve their communities had their lives and their reputations destroyed through absolutely no fault of their own. The victims must get justice and compensation."

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