If you want to really get people’s attention, tell them a story.”
Gwyneth Hughes, writer of Mr Bates Vs the Post Office
I started to think about storytelling when the Post Office Horizon scandal hit the headlines and stayed there at the start of January 2024. Mr Bates Vs the Post Office, the ITV drama that humanised the story, sits neatly in the overlap of story writing and my work as a public sector communications professional. I’d recommend comms people watch it on ITV-X if they haven’t already.
I knew the facts of the Post Office Horizon scandal. I’d followed it for over a decade in Private Eye and seen the occasional report on broadcast news (such as the High Court judgements). Something had changed, though. Suddenly, millions were aware of the news story and invested in seeing justice for the hundreds of victims of a system that refused to believe people over software.
Storytelling is what has made this miscarriage jump to the front pages. The dramatized version, written by Gwyneth Hughes and produced for ITV, aired in the lull after the Christmas sparkles were fading and before the political news cycle restarted. Over the course of four nights, Hughes told the story of the scandal in a way people could relate to and could engage with.
Using storytelling structure to engage people with complex narratives
The first episode gives us our core leads: Alan Bates who refused to sign off financial accounts he knew were wrong, and Jo Hamilton, who watched her shortfalls multiply even as she sat on the Horizon helpline. Other story threads covered a postmaster who pleaded guilty and went to prison, and another who went bankrupt. The episode ends with them having found each other and realising they are not, as the Horizon helpline had claimed, alone. Later episodes add more people and their stories, bringing to life the tragic impact on individuals. Hughes moves the story from individual post office counters to the Royal Courts of Justice, as the tide turns, and the postmasters and postmistresses start to get High Court judgements in their favour.
The narrative structure echoes the classical heroic journey: the hero is called, embarks on a quest, faces their darkest moments where they falter and doubt themselves, and are ultimately victorious. It’s this storytelling structure that made over a million people sign, within a week, a 38 degrees petition calling for the CEO featured in the docudrama to be stripped of her CBE. She has handed it back. It’s led to questions in the House, and a new law being promised squash the convictions of the victims.
The journalists who spent over a decade carefully and rigorously investigating and reporting this scandal laid the groundwork. Without their meticulous work – and the drive of the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance – there would be no story to tell. If you go back to the Private Eye report, Justice Lost in the Post, they open with the personal stories. They also close with a list of the accountable people within the organisations, which is where this becomes a story for public sector communicators.
Ethical storytelling in the public sector
Hughes was careful to only use things Paula Vennells said in public, or in documents that have been released into the public domain. This is an ethical decision in the storytelling so the drama cannot be criticised for putting words in someone’s mouth.
This is where comms and PR ethics enters the chat.
The CEO failing to answer questions at a committee hearing, or the staffer fumbling to explain what “brand reputation” means, are moments in the drama that any comms person working in the public sector should find uncomfortable. They are moments where my advice would have been to be honest rather than digging a deeper hole.
Reading up on the case whilst writing this, I found this report from the public inquiry on how the Post Office crafted a narrative about Horizon that was cut and pasted into expert witness statements in prosecutions. That changed the whole shape of this post.
I’ve drafted a fair few lines to take in my time. There is absolutely a place to create a clear, consistent set of phrases to use about a sensitive topic. Everyone in comms and PR has a tale to tell of the time a senior exec went off-piste in an interview through insensitive or confusing comments. All we can do is offer advice, recommendations and help draft a statement. I’ve certainly sat and said words to the effect of “we can’t say that, it’s simply not true”.
Of course, senior leaders are free to ignore the advice. And once a media statement is released into the wild, there’s no control over where those words go, who uses them and how. I’ve seen phrases I helped shape appear in all kinds of places, sometimes to my surprise. But never, to my knowledge, in an expert witness statement in a criminal prosecution. I’ve worked with people who are called on as expert witnesses, and I never, ever, suggested they copy and paste a media statement into their testimony. I have to believe that no-one would have deliberately set out to put words in an expert witness’s mouth. That, to me, would have stepped over the ethical line of our profession.
Mr Bates Vs the Post Office is a valuable reminder that words and stories hold power. The power to wrongly convict people of crimes they did not commit, and the power to overthrow those injustices.