‘Am I an establishment figure?’ muses Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, the sole parliamentary hero of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV series that has galvanised the country into outrage. ‘Son of a baronet MP, Eton, Cambridge, the Bar, [member of] the Commons, the Lords, married to a High Court judge… Do you really have to ask?’
Perhaps not. But at a time when Old Etonian politicians are widely derided, such a CV makes it all the more remarkable that James Arbuthnot is being showered with glory. Why? For his role in bringing justice to the viciously mistreated sub-postmasters – victims of myriad miscarriages of justice who were, as Arbuthnot puts it, ‘vilified and shamed and humiliated in a way that most of us cannot imagine. They would have their children spat at in schools.’
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The 71-year-old is drinking a flat white in the Peers’ Guest Room in the Palace of Westminster, the red leather of its chairs embossed with a gold portcullis motif. He is, he says, ‘finding it all a bit embarrassing, actually, and overwhelming… what I achieved was pretty minimal. The person who achieved the breakthrough moments was Alan Bates [leader of the wronged sub-postmasters]. He’s a phenomenal man.’
The self-deprecation is winning, but others involved in the epic saga – Arbuthnot’s been on the case for 14 years thus far, chivvying ministers, battering the Post Office executives, leading groups of MPs, fulminating on TV, never letting up – say he was ‘absolutely essential’; that he ‘led the way both as an MP and a peer’ (he was MP for North East Hampshire until 2015); and that ‘without him, I don’t think [the sub-postmasters] would have got as far as they did’.
These encomia come from Nick Wallis, the author of The Great Post Office Scandal, who also describes the peer as ‘an old-school Tory’. Does Arbuthnot agree? He smiles. ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’ And is today’s Tory party still his sort of party? ‘No,’ he says, ‘I suppose it isn’t,’ his tone deliberate, his accent as you’d expect from an ex-captain of school at Eton, his words always forming perfect, grammatically correct sentences. His suit (‘from Dress2Kill near Waterloo’) is dark blue, his shirt pink, his patterned tie from Hermès. His ankle boots have laces.
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He continues, reflectively: ‘I take the Conservative whip in the House of Lords, but by the tips of my fingers. Over the past few years, I have felt uncomfortable with the direction of the Tory party… I resigned as a member for a few years, but I’ve re-joined because I believe in Rishi Sunak.’ But should Sunak stand down, ‘I don’t really know…’ Tellingly, he ‘hugely admires’ Rory Stewart and hoped he would win the Tory leadership contest in 2019. ‘But I didn’t resign because he was not the leader. I left because Boris Johnson was.’ Why? He pauses. ‘I didn’t think he was honest.’
It was the fact that Jo Hamilton, a wrongly accused and convicted sub-postmistress constituent of his, was so transparently honest that led him to fight. ‘If someone is obviously telling the truth, what do you do? You don’t just toss them aside, say “stuff you” and abandon them. Particularly if you’re in a job where you’re there to represent people.’ And especially not for someone like Arbuthnot, who had previously been a leading light in a successful 16-year-long campaign to exonerate two dead RAF pilots who had been officially blamed for causing the crash of a Chinook helicopter in 1994. Indeed, when he first met Bates’s MP, he joked that he felt ‘a campaign coming on’.
There’s more to him, of course: he has been married to Emma Broadbent, a High Court judge, for 39 years, and they have four children. He cooks, not because he likes it, but because ‘I’m not sure my wife knows where the kitchen is, and I enjoy eating’. His favourite restaurant is Wilton’s, that majestic haunt of dukes and tycoons. He plays guitar, but has never been in a band – ‘I’m more an individualist.’ (James Taylor and Bob Dylan are his speed.) A direct descendant of James V of Scotland, he pooh-poohs the pedigree, pointing to research which shows that ‘only 0.1 per cent’ of the population is not descended from royalty.
The Arbuthnots no longer have a place in London, so he travels home to Berkshire every night. Not exactly a cross to bear, as he’s a country person at heart, if an eccentric one; the Arbuthnots used to keep Irish wolfhounds as well as alpacas. Once, alas, a gate was left open, and Arbuthnot came upon an alpaca breathing its last and the Irish wolfhound ‘with blood all down its front, looking very, very proud of itself’. For months after, I was told, the family were fed alpaca pâté, sausages and ragu.
They now have a terrier and a Rhodesian ridgeback – a potentially ferocious dog that’s fitting for a man obsessed with the potential collapse of civilisation. (The ridgeback will keep marauders at bay.) What kept Arbuthnot up at night as first chair of the Commons Select Committee on Defence and then of the Lords Committee on Risk was ‘what happens if the electricity goes off’. There will be no money to be got, no water, no communications. ‘And this, I think, is the greatest threat to the Western world in security terms.’ Indeed, he says ‘the Russians have a ship called the Yantar, which is designed to cut cables both of power and data transmission. They’re building a fleet of these ships and they’ve been scouting around our offshore windfarms.’ So he’s a prepper, ready for the worst: when the pandemic started, he ‘already had enough of everything’. He smiles. ‘There was a shortage of loo paper, which may have been caused by me.’
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He believes that his ‘two obsessions’ of resilience and the Post Office can be married. Small post offices are the perfect hubs for community, and community is central to resilience. ‘And why anybody should wish to shut down a network of hubs, I cannot understand.’
But that’s what ministers allowed the Post Office to do – as well as to wrongly criminalise 900 or more of its sub-postmasters. And though he feels Ed Davey is getting too much stick for his inaction when minister in charge – he points out that successive Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative ministers all used the same excuse for torpor as Davey – he believes they all showed ‘a lack of curiosity’. A polite way of saying they passed the buck. But he also notes that when he was a junior minister, he too parroted the government line on the Chinook pilots. It was only when the Tories were out of office and he was a constituency MP, with time to read all the documents, that he realised he was wrong and did something out of the ordinary: he promptly apologised to the House of Commons and led the ultimately successful fight to exonerate the airmen.
It was not his only apology. He was mired in the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009, most notoriously claiming for having his swimming pool cleaned. ‘It’s a real embarrassment,’ he admits, explaining that MPs were ‘told to load their expenses rather than push for the salary rises the pay review board had said we should get. And so we did. And look at the cropper we all came. I came a larger cropper than many people.’
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But if anyone’s stained escutcheon has been wiped clean, it’s Arbuthnot’s. Just ask the sub-postmasters. And what he’s furious about is the failure, throughout the Post Office saga, of the various institutions to display the virtues of compassion, decency and the rule of law that Britain prides itself on. ‘That shows to me a system that is weighted against people who haven’t got any money.’ He goes further: a litany of wickednesses perpetrated by the Post Office is summarised as ‘all these things became par for the course for an organisation intent on covering up its own corruption’.
There are, he reckons, at least two more years to run in the scandal. ‘We are not at the bottom of this yet.’ Still, ‘I always believe that justice will be done. It’s just desperately frustrating. It takes too long.’ So long that ‘KBO [keep buggering on] is a good maxim’. In the ITV drama, Bates’s wife asks: ‘Who knew a Tory MP could be so nice?’ Eton has trained its son well.
This article was first published in the April 2024 issue of Tatler
