CW@60: Fighting for justice - twice

On 22 September 1966,  the launch issue of the world’s first weekly technology newspaper was published – today Computer Weekly is the UK’s oldest business IT title. What's changed the most for you since then? Here, Lord James Arbuthnot reflects on the role that Computer Weekly’s journalism has played in his parliamentary career.

Jonathan Tapper and Rick Cook were two of the best special forces pilots in the helicopter world. They were flying Chinook ZD576 in 1994 when it crashed on the Mull of Kintyre.

It was a huge news item - not just in terms of human tragedy. It raised issues about Northern Ireland and the IRA, about secret intelligence, about defence procurement and the purchase of Boeing aircraft from the USA. 

But computers? It still seems odd that the journal that was most instrumental in bringing about the several inquiries into the crash, and as a result changing the verdict of gross negligence against Tapper and Cook, should have been Computer Weekly.

But Tony Collins, the Computer Weekly journalist who pursued the story of the miscarriage of justice to the two pilots with extraordinary tenacity, knowledge and compassion, was given license by Computer Weekly to work on something that wasn’t its usual fare. 

And when John Cook, Rick’s father, approached me to ask me to reconsider my views on the crash - I had been a defence minister who took the Ministry of Defence line - it was Collins who persuaded me the pilots had indeed been wrongly treated according to the RAF’s own rules.

I took up the campaign started by Lord Chalfont and we assembled a team of parliamentarians and others to bring about the restoration of justice. It took 16 years, but we got there, with Collins uncovering new facts, processes and arguments all along the way. He was up against the might of Boeing, the US government and the UK government and was undaunted – indeed he seemed to revel in it.

So I took Computer Weekly seriously. And then in April 2009, a local councillor in my constituency told me about the case of Jo Hamilton, a subpostmaster in my constituency.  

He told me that Rebecca Thomson of Computer Weekly was writing an article about a fault with the Post Office’s Horizon computer system. I met Jo, the most believable person in the world, and over time I discovered that there were many more like her.

It then turned out that Tony Collins had put Thomson onto the story. That fact alone told me this was worth pursuing, and so another campaign began, again taking far too long to resolve but getting there (more or less) in the end. 

“Computer Weekly has kept up its relentless pressure by covering the Post Office scandal on a sometimes weekly basis”

James Arbuthnot

Again, a group of parliamentarians came in behind the redoubtable Alan Bates to fight for justice. Bates shares many of Collins’s qualities – dogged persistence, technical mastery, organisational brilliance and strategic vision as well as sheer bloody-mindedness.

Once again, Computer Weekly has kept up its relentless pressure by covering the Post Office scandal on a sometimes weekly basis. Karl Flinders has uncovered things that nobody else knew about, and has maintained a treasure trove of material which documents the ins and outs of this awful story. 

Others have joined in – Nick Wallis, Richard Brooks of Private Eye, and one or two (too few) others – but it has been Computer Weekly that has started and maintained the campaign and the momentum.

So Computer Weekly is now 60 years old. What a diamond.

James Arbuthnot, Baron Arbuthnot of Edrom, was a Conservative MP from 1987 to 2015, before becoming a life peer in the House of Lords. He is a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board.

James Arbuthnot photo © House of Lords / photography by Roger Harris.