Kafka 100: the Post Office scandal really was Kafkaeseque – it’s right out of his novel The Trial

Somebody must have laid false information against [him], for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.

So began the story of the 14-year ordeal endured by the former Sutton subpostmaster, Harjinder Butoy, arrested and charged with theft in 2007, jailed in 2008 and finally exonerated in 2021. His is a story now shamefully familiar thanks to the many experiences heard by the Post Office Inquiry. However, this line is not from a news report but belongs to Franz Kafka. Specifically, it’s the famous opening line of The Trial, which continues to resonate powerfully 100 years after the author’s death.

Generations of readers have found something deeply affecting, important and relatable in Kafka’s tale of Josef K. and his struggle against a malevolent prosecuting authority.

In his own time, Kafka’s writing spoke to justified anxieties among central European Jews who lived with terrible reminders of their social and legal precarity: reminders like the Dreyfus Affair; that notorious scandal in which the only Jewish officer in the French army was arrested in 1894 and tried on baseless treason charges. And there were also the blood libel trials in which Jews were accused of the ritual murder of Christians.

This article is part of our series marking 100 years since the death of writer Franz Kafka. These articles explore his legacy and influence on everything from cinema to law. To read more click here

First translated into English in 1937, The Trial (alongside The Castle) became a commentary on totalitarianism, Stalin’s Great Purge trials in Russia, McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the US, and the general climate of suspicion and paranoia during the cold war.

But what can be made of it now?

There are similarities in Kafka’s story with the UK’s Post Office scandal and the ongoing inquiry into the wrongful prosecution of over 900 subpostmasters between 1999 and 2014. Many of these men and women were accused of false accounting and theft for errors in the Post Office’s Horizon computer system, which wrongly showed money missing from their branches.

While K. never learns the nature of the accusation nor the identity of his accuser, the subpostmasters at least knew what they were being accused of. However, less clear was the source of the false information in question and the relationship between professional and prosecuting authorities.

It was often the very same people who came to “assist” them as auditors who then returned as interrogators with powers of arrest and prosecution. Furthermore, the accusations had at their heart an insidious non-human source, namely the flawed computer system Horizon. Fujitsu ,the company operating the system, failed to correct the errors, while the Post Office failed to properly investigate or admit there was a problem.

The combination of opaqueness and absurdity, as well as the exploitation of conscientious people’s readiness to blame themselves first, demonstrates that Kafka’s nightmare is no mere fantasy. And that the ghost of the maligned Josef K. haunts us still.

K. gleans no useful information about his case through his diligent inquiries, requests, and questions. But despite all of that, he never discards the belief that there must be something that he has done to mess things up, and something he can do to clear it all up again.

It is K. who pursues the examining magistrate even though the magistrate is in no hurry to speak to him. It is also K. who travels the corridors of the court buildings in search of the place where he should be interrogated.

Subpostmasters were individually told that nobody else had reported comparable problems with the accounting system. Many were driven to desperate and costly measures to satisfy impossible expectations.

Like K., the subpostmasters became their own investigators: committing hours to fruitless calls to the Horizon Helpline, to time-consuming training and supervision, and to multiple audits and searches in the hope that these might clear up the confusion. They paid the Post Office thousands of pounds from their own pockets to try to ward off imprisonment, and many agreed to admit to charges of false accounting just to make the ordeal stop.

But how does a story like this end?

The Trial is often assumed to be a pessimistic tale as it ends with the protagonist’s execution in a lonely, deserted quarry.

For K. there is no figure akin to Alan Bates (activist and advocate for the scandal’s victims) to help him see that he was not alone after all, or that the tables might eventually be turned on his accusers so that they themselves should come to feel the sting of disgrace and ostracism. Thanks to Bates and others, the Post Office Offences Act 2024 finally quashed all of the remaining convictions.

But the final paragraph of The Trial, in which the condemned K. recognises in a distant upstairs window “a human figure, faint and insubstantial”, surely speaks to a flickering hope for solidarity, friendship and the strength to go on:

Who was that? A friend? A good person? One who sympathised? One who wanted to help? Was it one person? Was it everybody? Was there still help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? Certainly there were. Logic is of course unshakeable, but it cannot hold out against one who wants to live.

The logic that seemed unshakeable for so many years was that only the dishonesty of the subpostmasters could possibly explain post office shortfalls. A return to Kafka’s words on the 100th anniversary of his death provides a timely reminder that such logic must in future be strenuously resisted.

David Gurnham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.