Ministers needed to look at bigger picture
After spending several months at the heart of government, David Cameron’s shoeless svengali Steve Hilton bemoaned the inability to pull at the levers of power.
And as Lady Hallett’s Covid inquiry is discovering, decision-making inside Whitehall at the height of the biggest public health crisis in a century was often beset by a Civil Service bureaucracy that was infested with acronyms but not action.
To blame the lack of real, meaningful help by the Government – until now – for the hundreds of postmasters wrongfully prosecuted in the Post Office scandal on Whitehall inertia would be one interpretation, but it is probably too kind towards a succession of ministers who failed to act.
It’s not like the scandal had not been widely publicised over more than 10 years – by journalists, notably Computer Weekly, Private Eye, Panorama and Nick Wallis’s Radio 4 podcast on the issue, and by MPs.
Yet it has taken the ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, just 10 days from its first broadcast for a Prime Minister to pledge sweeping changes that will exonerate and compensate the more than 700 postmasters.
The Covid inquiry has shown how, inside a Whitehall that spent years planning for the wrong pandemic, there is not enough challenge or critical thinking inside government.
Even faced with evidence that a major miscarriage of justice had unfolded on the watch of several ministers, it was easier to go with the consensus, shaped by the Post Office’s strenuous efforts to deny wrongdoing, than to stand up for hardworking public servants.
