IN 2013 – six years before Alan Bates won his big civil case – Scottish prosecutors missed a golden opportunity to act decisively on concerns that the Post Office’s computer evidence may not be reliable.

Mystifyingly, almost nobody in Scottish politics or the media seems interested in this missed opportunity, or why it was missed. After a promising start, Holyrood and much of the press has abandoned any effort to get to the bottom of Scottish aspects of the scandal, exploring the distinctive ways in which the Post Office’s toxic culture of incompetence, cover-up and suspicion resulted in scores of Scottish postmasters in court, wrongly accused of having their hands in the till.

But last week, we learned a lot more about the critical Scottish meeting which deferred a proper reckoning with the corporation’s many lies and evasions about the reliability of its accounting software, resulting in hundreds of subpostmasters being wrongly prosecuted or pursued for civil debts that they did not owe for money that they had not taken.

First, some context. In England and Wales, the Post Office had the legal authority to run its own criminal cases. But in Scotland, it was just a “specialist reporting agency” to the Crown Office. If it wanted a Scottish subpostmaster prosecuted for a shortfall, it needed to persuade the procurator fiscal that it had a corroborated case of theft, embezzlement or fraud.

Back in January, the Lord Advocate stressed that “right up till 2019”, the Post Office “continued to assert that the Horizon system was sound” and that the Crown Office was “entitled to take those assurances at face value”.

Scottish prosecutors, the Lord Advocate suggested, “would not have known, nor suspected” that the Post Office “might not have revealed the true extent of the Horizon problems” until after Mr Bates’s victory in the civil courts.

The problem with this suggestion is that we now know that some Scottish prosecutors did, in fact, suspect that Horizon might not be reliable six years before Mr Justice Fraser’s judgment put the matter beyond........

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