Jo Hamilton on fighting for justice after the Post Office scandal: ‘I’m not scared of anything or anyone’

Hamilton says she hasn't received a reply from the Prime Minister: "But, to be fair, he's been very busy." There was, though, a rapid invitation to meet Gareth Thomas, the junior minister in the Business and Trade department with Post Office responsibility.

"So I met him, but then got sent the usual bollocks from civil servants. 'It's not our fault. It's your lawyers and so on…' How dare they? It was a carbon copy of a letter from a civil servant I've been shouting at for years. So I sent him a blaster back."

Emphasising her tenacity as a campaigner – which continues in Mr Bates vs the Post Office: The Impact, an ITV1 follow-up documentary – Hamilton also contacted the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, whom she met when he was a Labour member of the select committee investigating the scandal.

"We got on OK at the select committee back in the day. And he sent me an email from his private account, which I guess doesn't go through his stupid civil servants. So I have access to him directly. He assured me the business minister is on it. So we just hope."

Hamilton, who was wrongly convicted of stealing £36,000, is also a demanding constituent in North East Hampshire. She acclaims as a "superhero", Lord (James) Arbuthnot, played by Alex Jennings in the drama, who helped to expose the cover-up and clear her name. But, when Arbuthnot retired, she found his Tory successor, Ranil Jayawardena, so unsatisfactory that: "I told him I was going to run for Parliament against him. He said, 'Please don't!'"

In fact, Jayawardena lost in July to Liberal Democrat candidate Alex Brewer, of whom Hamilton admits, "I just had a run-in with her. I wrote as soon as she got in and she wouldn't see me. Eventually, she offered me a meeting on 2nd October. So I wrote back and said, 'As this matter is so urgent, I am now dealing with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the minister directly.' Stick that up your pipe! She wrote back and said she was glad I was dealing with the people with the real power."

Some would say that power also lies with Hamilton and the newly knighted Sir Alan Bates – played by Toby Jones in the drama, organiser of the GLO (Group Litigation Order) of 555 Post Office claimants – especially since Mr Bates vs the Post Office aired. Does she feel that? "Being listened to at blooming last. It's that kind of power. You will bloody listen to me or I'll shout or go to the newspapers. I find that exciting after all this time. We've been yelling for years about this. And we were ignored, especially in Parliament. And now they're scared of us. There's still the usual bullshit that they say one thing and do another. But at least they see us now."

Just before we spoke, Hamilton had received a photo from Dolan of the actor receiving another award for impersonating her. She's excited but still astonished by how her life changed in early January this year, when Mr Bates vs the Post Office was screened. "My phone lit up just after the first episode started going out. And it never stopped."

Sir Alan is still fighting for his own financial settlement, alongside many others, whereas Hamilton has already done a deal. The figure is confidential, but "my lawyer asked me to come up with the figure I wanted and we got within £20,000 of that".

Since then, though, terms have been offered that are generally considered more generous. So does she now regret settling? "No! Hubby [David] had just got prostate cancer. It gave us enough money to pay off our mortgage and for him to give up work. He was 75 and still working as a gardener five days a week. And I had ten cleaning jobs across five days. We were like hamsters in a wheel. And it brought choice about whether we still wanted to work. And not to have a mortgage is amazing. We've not got masses of savings in the bank, but what we have is our house. We can sell it and downsize when we want to."

She continues to fight for the hundreds of those still uncompensated, however, because "I can't believe we're still getting the same bulls**t. There's a 91-year-old waiting for compensation. How bloody dare they? I said to the minister a couple of weeks back: she's 91, so can't someone just pay her? Don't screw her over. Just give her the money. They still say to us that they have to be careful with the public purse. But they're paying lawyers twice what they're offering us. So who's being careless with the public purse?"

When I put Hamilton's complaints to the Department for Business and Trade, a spokesperson responded: "We recognise the immeasurable suffering postmasters have endured and that they've waited too long to receive redress. That's why we are working tirelessly across government to bring them some relief with full, fair and swift redress. Already we’ve paid out over £260 million to over 2,800 people across three redress schemes. We've also made 227 GLO offers and introduced a new compensation scheme to speed up redress for those with overturned convictions."

Hamilton still does around ten hours of house-cleaning a week, but fits it around sittings of the statutory public inquiry into the Post Office scandal, which enters its seventh and final phase this month. She has attended most days, deliberately sitting in direct sight of witnesses such as former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells, ex-business improvement director Angela van den Bogerd and another ex-CEO of the Post Ofice, Dame Moya Greene.

Does Hamilton find the inquiry upsetting? "It just makes me angrier. And I really enjoy sitting there watching them squirm as Jason [Beer, KC, the victims' counsel] reads out horrible things they wrote about me. Paula Vennells wrote that I 'lacked passion' and she was 'more bored than outraged' by the story. And I just sat there looking at her deadpan but enjoying every moment. I was sat just feet away from her when she kept saying she was sorry. As some of the others did. And Jason said: 'Well, you're all sorry now that it's all up on a screen in front of you!'"

It is now 21 years since the first doubts were raised about the reliability of the Horizon IT system. During the two decades when the campaign received little publicity and no success, the Post Office and government – evidence to the inquiry seems strongly to suggest – hoped that the subpostmasters would eventually give up.

"Yes," agrees Hamilton. "But I couldn't. I was so angry. I promised my mum and my dad when they were dying that I would never give up, regardless of what was thrown at us." As the ITV1 documentary illustrates, even more victims have come forward since the drama.

"I'm in two big WhatsApp groups of victims, but I tend to sit back and let them support each other. I chip in occasionally to get the mood up. Some people have been to hell and back. I was just really fortunate that my community got around me because they couldn’t believe what had happened." Sir Alan "isn't on our WhatsApps because he doesn't join groups. But he speaks to me privately."

After Sir Alan, is there a chance of Dame Jo? "I don't think they'll ever give me that. I've annoyed them too much. But I certainly wouldn't turn down an OBE like Alan originally did."

Some who suffer upsetting events revisit them in sleepless nights. Does she? "I don't have nightmares. I've dealt with it and it's made me a much stronger person. I'm not scared of anything or anyone. If you said to me now, 'The King wants to see you,' I'd just go to see him.

"But I struggle to get to sleep some nights because I lie there thinking: 'Oh, for God's sake, why can't you just pay people?' Hubby goes off to bed and my mind starts whirring with who I can write to next. So I'm campaigning in my head, as it were. But it's not for my trauma, it's other people's. The only thing I'm still heartbroken about is that my mum and dad didn't live to see me get my conviction quashed. But that's the way it is.

"When all the original 555 people we represented have been paid, I'll feel I've done my job and can stop and will shut up and go away."

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