Jo Hamilton: After Post Office scandal, I'm a cleaner for those who supported me

Times

7 hours ago

Shortly before Christmas, Jo Hamilton learnt she was receiving an OBE for services to justice. It was a 'total honour' — a public vindication that she had been right all along and the Post Office wrong.
She was less thrilled when, soon afterwards, someone who sounded 'as old as my granddaughter' from the Department for Business and Trade called to ask if she'd like to send a nice photograph of herself for them to put up on their website. 'I said, 'You really don't get it, do you? We're at war! The fact you gave me an OBE changes nothing,' ' Hamilton says, laughing hard with incredulity.
Hamilton hung up and called her friend Lee Castleton, a former sub-postmaster from Bridlington, East Yorkshire, who was also on the honours list and whose life had also been destroyed by the Post Office. 'Did they try that with you?' Hamilton asked. 'He said no, they wouldn't dare, and I just thought, 'Cheeky bastards.' '
The stories of Hamilton, 68, and Castleton, 56, and the roles they played in what has been described as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history, are now well known. They were brought to widespread public attention in January 2024 by the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, in which Castleton was played by Will Mellor and Hamilton by Monica Dolan. Last month Hamilton joined Dolan on stage at the Baftas, where the series picked up the award for best limited drama.
Hamilton was one of more than 900 sub-postmasters prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for offences including theft, fraud and false accounting. This happened as a result of incorrect information from the Post Office's faulty Horizon accounting system, built and run by the Japanese firm Fujitsu. More than 230 sub-postmasters were sent to prison, and 2,800 were asked to pay back money to escape prosecution.
Many lost their homes, their reputations and were vilified by their neighbours and customers. Marriages broke down. At least five killed themselves and hundreds died before they could see justice done. Many are still waiting for adequate compensation. Alan Bates, the sub-postmaster who became ITV's famous 'Mr Bates', revealed last month that he had been offered a 'take it or leave it' offer of less than half of his original claim.
The Horizon system began showing shortfalls in Hamilton's accounts in 2003. In June 2006 she was accused of stealing £36,000 from her Post Office branch in South Warnborough, Hampshire. She had never taken a penny, but was unable to explain where the money had gone. To avoid the more serious charge of theft, she accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to 14 cases of false accounting. She escaped prison, but was ordered to pay back the money plus costs. After decades of torment, her conviction was quashed in 2021 by the Court of Appeal.
• Alan Bates says Post Office scandal victims still awaiting payouts
When she came home from her day in court, the village had been decked out in bunting. This is what got her through the decades of darkness, she says: the fact that 'no one in the community ever believed I'd done it'. The village raised £6,000 to help her pay back the money. She was forced to remortgage her house and use her parents' pension for the remaining £30,000, plus £1,000 costs.
At the heart of the scandal is the fact that the Post Office — which is owned by the government — pressed ahead with prosecutions and maintained Horizon was 'robust' even when there were mounting concerns about bugs with the software.
They also said for years that remote access to sub-postmasters' accounts was a total impossibility, when in fact Fujitsu employees were able to remotely access and change accounts as early as 2002.
The Horizon inquiry, which began in 2020, led by the retired High Court judge Sir Wyn Williams, is expected to report later this year. Hamilton is steeling herself for its publication, for the possibility of retribution and criminal prosecutions of individuals. Finally, she might learn what really went on. 'I'm still confused. Why did they do it?' she says. 'I still think every day, 'Why the hell did that happen?' '
Hamilton still lives in the same cream cottage in South Warnborough. She is small and warm and very keen to offer biscuits and tea while Minnie, her Jack Russell cross, barks at ankles. Her husband of 50 years, David, waves cheerily from a Union Jack flagpole he is fixing in the front garden. Hamilton cuts a deeply unlikely figure as a criminal. With her friend Alan Bates, she has become one of the leading voices in the campaign for justice and is now publishing a memoir, Why Are You Here, Mrs Hamilton?.
What's remarkable is how often she erupts in laughter when detailing her 20-year ordeal fighting the Post Office. This, you sense, has become her armour. 'I realised early on that I had to find the humour in the madness somewhere, or the anger would be corrosive and totally consume me,' she says. 'And I felt that if I let that happen, I would be paralysed and then nothing would change — and we wouldn't get the justice we deserved. Falling into a black hole would have been so easy, but then they would have won.'
• When did the Post Office scandal start? Timeline of key events
She is still obsessed with getting justice for sub-postmasters, and rarely gets more than three hours' sleep. Her brain whirrs, going over who she can email, what she can do next. 'I do now get responses from people in high places, but they're usually bullshit — a pat on the head,' she says.
Compensation for the sub-postmasters is keeping her up at night. It's an ugly mess, she says, with sub-postmasters caught up in various complicated bureaucratic schemes. As of April 30, about £964 million had been paid in compensation. More than 5,700 of those affected have received full redress, but a further 3,712 are still waiting. She has had assurance from Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, that the money has been set aside. 'So why the hell can't they just pay everyone? Then we'll go away and be quiet,' she says.
Hamilton last year settled for 80 per cent of her claim with the Post Office because she was 'exhausted and had had enough'. (The government has now taken over responsibility from the Post Office for the claims of all postmasters who had their convictions overturned.) She began negotiating in 2021 and was initially offered 20 per cent. Then earlier this year she was offered a top-up to take her to 100 per cent. 'I said, 'What's the catch? Am I gagged?' ' she recalls. She was told it was because the compensation schemes are now settling at higher rates than when she started and it was done to achieve parity. But 'the cynic in me thinks they had another agenda and part of me thinks it was done to help make me go away', she says.
She is appalled that the government is spending extortionate amounts on lawyers that could be used for the compensation schemes. A team of government-funded independent psychologists, forensic accountants and lawyers have been deployed to assess individuals and come up with a figure for compensation, but claims are also being contested by the Department for Business and Trade.
'They keep saying it's the public purse, but it's the public purse that's paying their litigation. So stop paying people who are trying not to pay us,' she says.
After the outrage unleashed by the ITV drama last year, many politicians — including Rishi Sunak, then the prime minister — promised payouts, which got everyone cheering. Was this just an easy way of making political hay, safe in the knowledge that it was unlikely these payoffs would actually happen?
'That's where I think we're headed, but over my dead body is that going to happen,' Hamilton says.
When Hamilton stepped into the dock at Winchester Crown Court in February 2008, waiting for sentencing, no one — least of all herself — expected her to go home that night. The day before, her probation officer had told her she had a '75 per cent chance of going to prison', at which point she had cried uncontrollably, 'feeling pure terror'. She had spent the night unable to sleep, dozing off only to wake up with a start, thinking, 'Oh God, I'm in prison.' In her prison bag she had packed 14 pairs of pants and, being a keen rider, some books on equine science 'to occupy my mind'.
Before she stepped into the courtroom, her mother slipped her an envelope. 'We have travelled a long road and thank God we are nearly at the end. We have such admiration for the way you have coped and whatever the outcome, we are right behind you,' the card read.
Inside the court, she found what looked like a village hall meeting. Seventy-four people from the community she had served, including the vicar, had unexpectedly turned up in support. Nearly every single person in South Warnborough had provided character references. The judge, she says, was perplexed: 'You have pleaded guilty to a very serious criminal offence, but these people clearly love you. Why are you in my court? Why are you here?' he asked.
Hamilton and David, whom she met when he was in the army and she was working for the Army Personnel Research Establishment, bought a house with her parents in South Warnborough in 1999. Later she took over running the village shop and for a while it was 'a rural idyll'. She added a café and it became the place where all the locals met for lunch and tea. In 2003, the same year the Post Office installed a chip-and-pin payment system, she took over as sub-postmaster.
Then the system started showing shortfalls, and they kept coming. For months she didn't tell her family, not 'wanting to let them down'. Debt mounted. She felt humiliated, ashamed, determined to fix it all herself. But she couldn't. When she called Horizon, she was told she was the only sub-postmaster having trouble with the system. 'I honestly felt mental. I don't know how I didn't have a full breakdown,' she says. Waves of panic washed over her and her GP signed her off with depression. After an audit from the Post Office run 'by bullies in suits', she was charged with stealing £36,000 and sacked.
She had hoped that if she just told the truth she would be OK, able to show that she wasn't guilty. 'I kept expecting the police to interview me, but of course they didn't,' she says — the Post Office was in the unique position of being able to carry out private prosecutions without running the charges past the CPS first.
It was only years later, in 2013, that forensic Second Sight accountants doing an independent review into Horizon uncovered the original report from the investigation into her case. The report said there was no evidence of theft. It meant, she explains, that they had no right to charge her, that her life had been wrecked on a lie. It was, she believes, why the Post Office had out of the blue offered her a plea bargain that included agreeing not to mention the Horizon system in any mitigation hearings that might follow. 'If it had gone to court, they would have had to disclose that document. They knew exactly what they were doing,' she says. 'I think it's criminal, but that is for the Crown Prosecution Service to decide.'
• Jo Hamilton: What the Post Office did to Horizon victims was criminal
More than a year after her sentencing, in May 2009, Computer Weekly published an investigation featuring seven different Horizon cases, including Hamilton's — a story the Post Office tried unsuccessfully to kill. 'It was, like, 'Oh my God, there are loads of us' — I felt sick,' Hamilton recalls. It was a small magazine with a niche readership, but its impact was significant. On November 8, 2009, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance met for the first time at Fenny Compton Village Hall in Warwickshire, where an idea of the scale of the injustice began to cut through (see panel).
Hamilton became one of the key figures in the campaign, determined to expose what was going on. If Alan Bates was 'the brains' behind the fight, she says, 'I was HR — I hoovered up all the wobbly people. If you've ever met Alan, you'll realise he just isn't a people person.'
The Post Office, she says, soon upped the ante. In 2010-2011, two sub-postmasters who had become her friends — Seema Misra, from West Byfleet in Surrey, who was eight weeks pregnant, and Jacqueline McDonald, from Broughton in Lancashire — were sent to prison. For Hamilton, a switch was turned on. 'I was possessed, I turned into a mad woman,' she says. 'I just thought, 'You are going to pay for this.' I have never stopped being angry.'
Meanwhile, stress was unfurling. Drowning in debt, she sold the village shop in 2014 but found it impossible to get a job with a criminal record and began cleaning houses. Many people from the village clamoured for her to work for them. One, whom she calls Mrs P, later stepped in to lend her the money to stop her house from being repossessed.
Hamilton has two adult sons, one of whom is a police detective, and for years he had to declare his mother's conviction. One day, as captured in the ITV drama, Hamilton was helping to make Easter bonnets at one of her three grandchildren's schools when the head teacher came in, deeply apologetic, and told her she would have to leave — she couldn't be alone with the children on account of her conviction. It was 'heartbreaking and humiliating', but 'I was lucky in that everyone believed me. Imagine if it hadn't been the case,' she says.
She will never, she says, get over the toll it all took on her parents. 'They were both hale and hearty and then they had strokes within three months of each other. What are the chances?' she says. Her father died in 2016, her mother in 2017.
Hamilton was diagnosed with an 'adjustment disorder' — a strong emotional reaction to stress or trauma — and depression. She has terrible health anxiety. Her husband has managed to let most of it wash over him, she says.
In 2019 the Post Office reached a £58 million settlement with the 555 sub-postmasters who had taken legal action after the High Court ruled that there were bugs and defects in the Horizon system that rendered it unreliable. After the group's lawyers took their fees, there was £12 million left over to be divided between the sub-postmasters — the start of their battle for adequate compensation.
None of the postmasters, Hamilton says, was prepared for quite how brutal the trial was. She felt the Post Office lawyers were aggressive in their cross-examinations. They applied to recuse the judge and then appealed when this application failed. 'It was all tactics from the Post Office to run us out of money,' Hamilton says. She was disgusted to discover that the Post Office had spent £140 million on legal fees fighting them — £10 million, she has been told, would have been the expected amount. 'It was mind-blowing, but they thought they'd win.' The Post Office has now spent more than £250 million on legal fees since 2014.
Why does she think the Post Office continued the legal fight, rather than acknowledge it had made mistakes? 'I don't know if they got in a hole and had to keep digging. I really don't know,' she says.
In 2021 her conviction was overturned, along with that of 38 others, in a judgment that carries her name: Hamilton & Others v Post Office Ltd. 'When they read out all the names — 39, three of us dead — the sense was, 'What have they done? Really, what have they done?' ' she says. 'It's such a waste. Everything could look so different. I don't dwell on it or I get too angry.'
The ITV drama seemed as if it would change everything, she says, finally galvanising public outrage. The inquiry had already started, attended until this point only by a couple of regular reporters and sub-postmasters, including Hamilton. But as soon as the series came out in January last year, it was inundated by press. 'The courtroom went from being silent to full to the brim — so busy that you couldn't get into the building. The inquiry team were funny. They told me, 'So this is all your doing,' ' Hamilton says with a laugh.
She first met Monica Dolan, the actress who would play her, at a script read-through, where Dolan asked Hamilton what she thought of her hair, which had been done up in Hamilton's signature style. Hamilton loved it. She made Dolan a recording detailing her life story. 'She would listen to it every morning on her way to the set,' Hamilton says. 'She wanted to immerse herself in my character.' They're still regularly in touch and message about each other's dogs.
Hamilton still works as a cleaner. Riding has always been her escape and she needs the income to look after her horse and pay for grazing. But cleaning is also, she says, 'an act of service for all those who have shown me such love and support in the village and trusted me with the keys to their homes when, for all the world to see, I was someone with a criminal record.'
Most of her time is spent campaigning. She is encouraged by the new Post Office CEO, Neil Brocklehurst, appointed last month, who recently sat down with her for two hours. 'But until the government sorts the compensation mess out, whatever he does, even if it's got gold stars all over it, it doesn't matter because they can't move forward until we are all sorted,' she says.
For Hamilton, Paula Vennells, CEO from 2012 to 2019, is one of the worst offenders of the scandal. 'Whatever she did or didn't know,' Hamilton says, her greatest failing 'was just not putting this to bed, not sorting it out. She could have stopped it.'
There was nothing accidental about what happened, Hamilton believes, and she has not seen 'one shred' of genuine remorse for what they went through. 'Maybe a couple of people at the inquiry have looked upset about what happened,' she says. 'But most of it was because they were upset that they'd been caught. As Tim Moloney — the KC questioning Paula Vennells — said to her, 'You've had a taste of [what it's like]. And it's not very nice, is it?'
She's not convinced Fujitsu has got off lightly, as others have claimed. 'They're the software people. And I mean, they must have been aware of what was going on, but they didn't prosecute us. It was the Post Office who did that to us.'
On November 8, 2009, just like in the ITV drama, I set off with Issy Hogg, my dear friend who was also a criminal defence lawyer, to meet the other victims who had suffered just like I had for the last five years.
Issy had to drive me as I was so broke I couldn't afford the petrol to get there. I had baked loads of cakes and biscuits and remember thinking what a waste it would be if no one turned up. But it was the only way I could contribute, really, or exert any kind of control over what was happening — I knew that all this hinged on whether there were other victims and if they were brave enough to share their stories.
Alan Bates and his lovely partner, Suzanne, were already there when I arrived — we'd never met in person but I instantly felt as if I was in the company of two kindred spirits. We unpacked my cakes and nervously agreed to give it 20 minutes to see if more people arrived and then, just like on the TV, car after car arrived. I don't think I will ever forget that moment.
As about 40 to 50 of us — sub-postmasters and some partners — sat around in a big circle I remember thinking two things: first that the Post Office had told every single one of us, over and over, 'You're the only one,' and that was a lie. And the second thing was how utterly haunted and exhausted we all looked. The catharsis and agony of sharing our stories was a monumental moment in this whole battle — that feeling of euphoria as we shared with people who understood the sheer and all-consuming terror, shame, guilt and loneliness.
I remember Alan saying, 'From this moment forwards none of us will be the only one ever again.' I remember Issy too saying, 'I have been a lawyer for over 30 years and as I sat in that meeting, in a freezing cold village hall, all I could think was, 'I know what a criminal looks like.' As I listened to all those people who'd never met and heard the similarities in their stories and what they went through, I thought, 'These people aren't criminals. There's something very seriously wrong here.' 'Why Are You Here, Mrs Hamilton? The Post Office Scandal and My Extraordinary Fight for Justice is out on June 19 (Blink £20). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members