Why Are You Here, Mrs Hamilton?

My first big discrepancy came in the shape of a 2000 shortfall that just made no sense at all. Of all the things that kept me awake once in the thick of the nightmare that unfolded, it was being stuck in that truly incomprehensible moment where the mere touch of a button suddenly turned 2000 into 4000 within three minutes on that cold December night in 2003. Jo Hamilton was one of more than 700 sub-postmasters prosecuted between 2000 and 2014 based on information from the Post Office’s faulty Horizon accounting system. She was told to put right a wrong she hadn’t committed and pushed to the very brink of her existence – remortgaging her house, borrowing from anyone she could in order to repay money that she hadn’t taken, and questioning her own sanity. Immortalised in the ITV smash hit drama, ‘Mr Bates v the Post Office’, this is Jo Hamilton’s extraordinary first-hand account.