I received a very important message from the Post Office the other day.
It wasn’t the one I’ve been dreaming of: that it was being disbanded after the postmasters’ scandal.
No, this was a warning to me not to gamble my life away.
I’m afraid I’ve already failed that test on a number of fronts due to always feeling like 17 in my head.
More specifically, the e-mail was a dire warning about not using my Post Office travel card “on gambling websites or gambling anywhere in the UK”.
It’s blocked, so don’t try.
I wondered if they were monitoring me from a computer terminal far away and coming to the wrong conclusions (no, let’s not go there).
I was touchy because it was a little ambiguous and addressed directly to me as “Dear David”, as though I had a problem personally.
Not me, guv. Picking on an innocent party again?
Surely they could weed out real problem gamblers by using the skills of their IT experts (let’s not go there either).
I once dabbled on a poker site years before I had a Post Office travel card.
Free training online just for fun, so no cash or cards.
But I gave up eventually because it took up too much time; a lot of effort is required to bluff successfully – just look at the Post Office.
It was a general warning to all cardholders, of course.
Proclaiming – from a somewhat unnatural position on the moral high ground – that it was acting as part of the PO’s “responsible serving policy”.
I had to smile bitterly at the painful irony.
Especially after it had zealously driven many falsely-accused postmasters into ruin and even pursued some to their graves.
A bit early in its rehabilitation, I thought – like imagining Paula Vennells being given her tarnished CBE back.
Dubious former bosses, and other “experts”, are still being hauled before the official inquiry into one of the country’s worst institutional scandals.
Freshly-triumphant Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey squirmed under recent interrogation.
He had a key supervisory role over the Post Office between 2010 and 2012 when these terrible events were unfolding.
His party made significant advances in the Highlands at the general election; conversely, the region also has its share of postmaster heartbreak stories.
Such as North Uist postmaster Bill Quarm whose family said he died a “broken man” after a false conviction in 2010.
Peterhead postmaster Susan Sinclair suffered humiliation after being ordered to carry out unpaid community work when she was wrongly convicted.
Court actions were damaging the communities they served
These court actions were also damaging the very communities they served.
They were among 100 Scottish postmasters caught up in it – they deserve proper justice and retribution against their persecutors.
Perhaps I took offence at the sudden surge of social conscience in my mailbox after useless Post Office bosses gambled so recklessly with people’s lives.
This once-respected institution went down the drain but persists with the broken Post Office brand for some odd reason.
I get the fact they are trying to limp into a new era beyond the scandal to regain some measure of respect.
But it’s like searching in vain for some fantasy place up in the clouds like Sugarcandy Mountain in Orwell’s Animal Farm, where sugar and cake supposedly grew in the hedges, and persecuted slaves went when they died.
It’ll be a long wait for the Post Office; the brand itself looks mortally wounded to me.
Well done for warning gamblers against misusing their cards.
But a wolf in sheep’s clothing is a hard image for the Post Office to shake off.
After the summer break, the next Post Office Horizon inquiry phase deals with current working practices and how the organisation moves forward.
I’ve said before that it’s now the “Past Office” and should be rebranded with a new name, structure and bosses to safeguard us all for evermore.
If anything good is to come out of the inquiry then surely it must be criminal prosecutions and potential jail sentences for those responsible.
“I don’t remember” or “In retrospect, I would have done things differently” don’t cut it.
If drunk drivers in the Highlands and north-east offered the same excuse after destroying people’s lives would that get them off the hook?
I’m not saying politicians like Davey should be prosecuted (he maintains he was lied to), but they could be judged guilty of “lack of attention to detail” at the very least.
My son paid the Post Office to guarantee next-day Royal Mail delivery recently for a special birthday card – it arrived three days late.
So I decided to hand-deliver our postal voting forms to Aberdeen Council as the general election was only a few days away at the time.
I thought going to a Post Office was a bit of a gamble.
David Knight is the long-serving former deputy editor of The Press and Journal
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