‘It was a scandal hiding in plain sight.” “The result of a series of choices, the sum of state neglect and corporate wrongdoing.” “Most assumed that they had been caught up in a bureaucratic tangle; few guessed that thousands of others were experiencing the same difficulties.” “It is a peculiar sensation, telling the truth repeatedly and being repeatedly told you are lying.” “Our representatives chose time and again not to act on mounting evidence.” “This is a story about who gets listened to in Britain and who gets ignored.”

These could be quotes from an article about the Post Office scandal. All are, in fact, taken from Show Me the Bodies, Peter Apps’s harrowing account of the Grenfell fire, and The Windrush Betrayal, Amelia Gentleman’s unsparing investigation into the human consequences of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policies.

The depth of public outrage elicited by the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office has forced the government to take extraordinary measures to exonerate hundreds of wrongly convicted subpostmasters and speed up compensation.

The Post Office scandal is, though, but one of a series – from the Hillsborough stadium disaster to Grenfell, from the NHS contaminated blood tragedy to child sexual abuse in Rotherham, from the English language testing fiasco to the Windrush horrors – each of which is different but all of which reveal certain underlying themes. Some are about corporate greed, others about official malfeasance or government neglect. And some about both. What all have in common is the lack of public accountability for the misdeeds that have devastated so many people’s lives.

In the case of the Post Office, there has been talk of........

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