It’s jaw-dropping stuff. This Post Office inquiry has revealed a variety of fascinating goings-on that I recognise all the way down here in little-ol’ adjudication.

Alan Bates vs the Post Office is group litigation: some 550 sub-postmasters got their act together and challenged the Post Office in court, for what they said were huge wrongs landed on their shoulders. The lid was blown off – and quite to smithereens – by Mr Justice Fraser in his scathing denouncement of the Post Office and his exoneration of the sub-postmasters running their village stores and selling stamps and dishing out pensions.

The entire and very sad episode has been widely described as a very serious miscarriage of justice by the Post Office. The formal and subsequent government inquiry that is in place and unfolding daily live on YouTube is aiming to find out what and why it went so badly wrong.

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