When the prosecutions really kicked off Sir Ed Davey was Minister for postal services. Alan Bates wrote to him several times but Davey refused to meet him and just replied parroting the Post Office line.
He now says the Post office lied to him. Thats no excuse. When he was informed of problems, it was his job to ensure a proper investigation into it to get to the truth. That was why he was paid his ministerial salary.
In 2017, the Post office hired a big firm of lawyers ( HSF) to deal with the "criminal" postmasters.
Soon after, HSF hired Sir Ed Davey as an adviser on £15000 a month. Dont need to join many dots to work out what they hired him for.
If he can find a shred of decency somewhere within himself, he should retire from public life and give up his knighthood.
Starmer isnt blameless in this either. When he was DPP his department took over some of the post office prosecutions including the case of Seema Misra.
She was sent to prison, and she says the only reason she didnt kill herself was that she was pregnant at the time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50756192https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/2217/2151Im no great lover of the Tories, but credit where its due. Tory MP James (now Lord) Abuthnot, heard about the case. He took it on, got his teeth into it and didnt give up until some kind of justice was in sight.
As an aside. Several senior civil servants were on the board of the Post office (on £40k pa each) while all this was happening.
One criticism of the ITV programme is that it left out any mention of Alan Crozier. He took over at the top of the Post office after Vennels left.
After that he became head of ITV and its studios, who made the programme. I read that he still holds shares in ITV.
He is now head of BT.
Imo quite a few senior people from Post office, Fujitsu, and probably politics should be put behind bars over this.
Innocent people took their own lives. Many people had their lives destroyed or severely damaged.
Probably wont happen though.