According to Downing Street, the prime minister is now backing a knighthood for Alan Bates. Bates’s 20-year campaign for justice for post office operators has finally got the recognition it deserves thanks to ITV’s extraordinarily consciousness-raising drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. But why not offer him a peerage? It seems odd to think he would somehow fall short of a standard apparently cleared easily by Michelle Mone.
The obvious answer would seem to be that Mr Bates is not rich or parasitic enough, has never moved in the “right” circles, nor has he given enough money to a political party, ideally the governing Conservatives. (Boris Johnson alone appointed enough peers to account for 11% of the entire current House of Lords.) Furthermore, Alan Bates has not taken a penny for his decades of tireless labour, somehow failing to realise that you are supposed to get very rich doing something, and then receive an honour to say well done. Either that or you should assist Liz Truss in detonating the country’s economic stability.
But aside from those shocking black marks against Bates’s name, isn’t he precisely the sort of person most people would like to have in an upper chamber worth its salt? Dogged, steely, unshowy, and unemotional by design, Bates is almost tailor-made of the characteristics we ought to seek in public servants. (Whether or not he’d want the role is naturally a separate issue.)
We will be unpicking for some while the reasons ITV’s landmark drama has struck quite so deep a chord with the public at this particular moment in time. A very large part of it is, of course, the story itself, which is a tale of such staggering and long-term injustice that it should beggar belief. But crucially, it doesn’t quite beggar belief. It’s increasingly hard not to think the drama has landed quite so well because it speaks to something people feel about the way UK society can be stacked. Many feel there is something rotten in the state of British life – and given that it has taken a TV drama to get the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history into the forefront of national consciousness, they would surely be right. A whole host of systems, institutions and individuals have failed in order for us to reach this strange point, and in this most circuitous way. (Large sections of the media included.)
A House of Lords riddled with cronyism and self-interest is part of that. And so it is that even after such a formidable and hitherto thankless campaign, Alan Bates is still somehow the sort of guy you’d just give a knighthood to, while Mone or Evgeny Lebedev or incredibly minor officials from Johnson’s disgraced administration get to have their say on the shape of British laws for life. Or at least, those who bother turning up do.
Interviewed by the Times last weekend at home in Colwyn Bay, Bates assured the paper that it didn’t matter he’d never been paid for his work, on top of having had his business destroyed by the Post Office, because “you don’t need a ridiculous amount of money” in life. For some reason I am reminded of one of the many “at home” interviews Lord Lebedev has granted newspapers and interiors publications over the years, in which it was explained that his oculus – an architectural dome in one of his properties – “is lined with shards of blue amethyst”.
That said, I must be very careful mentioning Lebedev. He tends to respond in one way or another to a run-out in these pages, and is prone to accuse the Guardian and others of anti-Russian racist harassment. To which the only reasonable response is: lol. Peer of the realm, newspaper baron thanks to vast inherited wealth, half of Britain’s more credulous great-and-good on speed dial … if this is racism, I’m sure most people in this country would love to be signed up for a dose of it. Forgive me if it’s racist to say that the House of Lords has no record Evgeny Lebedev has ever voted – not even once.
None of which is meant to imply that all peers are workshy or venal or self-aggrandising – very far from it. One of the other tireless campaigners for justice for the post office operators is the former Conservative MP James Arbuthnot, now Lord Arbuthnot, who this week gave an object lesson in self-deprecation. “In the end, I achieved nothing,” he reflected to the Times. “I’m sad to have to say that it has actually been significantly less effective than I wish it had been. As you probably deduced from the drama, however heroic I and other MPs appeared, I achieved absolutely nothing.” How markedly in contrast that stands to the crazed bandwagonning of some MPs and ministers this week, who have fallen over themselves to look retrospectively heroic now that the scandal has gone radioactive.
As for Arbuthnot’s views on Alan Bates, with whom he remains in touch most days, they reflect the idiosyncratic inscrutability of the former post office operator, which the actor Toby Jones identified when trying to work out how to play him. “It’s hard to say what Alan makes of things,” Artbuthnot told the Times. “He just ploughs on. He’s much more stubborn than I am, working away at his unpaid work.”
It would be nice to think the honours committee would at least offer Alan Bates the chance to become formal House of Lords colleagues with Arbuthnot. Maybe the trouble with Mr Bates is that he would feel a sense of responsibility to turn up and do the job.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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