Why do so many public servants seem to understand so little about computers? - David Behrens

You can see the headlines now: “Cyclone Katie Hopkins blamed for leaving hundreds homeless.”

To that list we might add the names of people in public office who have screwed up spectacularly. And we could start with Shaun McNally, chief executive of the useless Electoral Commission, who admitted this week that the details of 40m voters had been stolen by computer hackers; that it was over a year before his staff even noticed and another 10 months before they told the rest of us. This, by the way, is the agency we’re supposed to trust with implementing voter ID at the polling booths.

But Shaun and his team aren’t really a storm, are they? More of a dismal shower.

They are certainly not the only ones to wield enormous public IT budgets but little or no knowledge about computers. Someone at the Northern Ireland police was revealed this week to have published the names, locations and employment details of 10,000 officers and staff in the course of answering a Freedom of Information request.

In a province still suffering the fallout from generations of terrorism, this is as serious as signing someone’s death warrant. Worse yet, the police didn’t even know it had happened until a local newspaper alerted them.

“We’ve identified some steps we can take to ensure that it doesn’t happen again,” said Chris Todd, the hapless assistant chief constable, who then asked any dissident republican types who had downloaded the information “to delete it straight away”. That’s like leaving the keys in your BMW and sticking a “please don’t steal” note on the windscreen.

Coming to Northern Ireland this winter, then: Typhoon Todd.

Yet even that is just a passing cloud compared to the maelstrom of IT mismanagement at the Post Office. As you will have read, hundreds of innocent subpostmasters were criminalised and in many cases jailed because a new computer system literally couldn’t add up. The software made it look as if money was missing and counter staff were blamed and prosecuted while IT bosses covered their tracks.

It is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history and the inquiry into how it happened is progressing as slowly as a second-class parcel.

This week, the Post Office’s chief executive, Nick Read, set out what he called a “healing journey” that would bring him to Leeds in October to meet victims of the scandal. Is that all? Because if so it’s the living definition of being the least he could do.

What he should be doing is publishing the names of every miserable manager who failed to prevent innocent people from losing their livelihoods and their liberty. And, believe me, handing over that sort of data is quite easily done – just ask the Northern Ireland police.

But he isn’t. He’s just promising vaguely to come to Leeds in two months’ time, if he can find a train that isn’t cancelled. The Post Office calls it a “remediation process” but if I had been treated in the way that those subpostmasters were abandoned to their fate it would be retribution I’d want, not remedy. Shake the boss’s hand and pretend we’re friends again? Not until I’d slammed the train door on his fingers.

And although Mr Read wasn’t at the Post Office when the broken IT system was commissioned, his behaviour since he arrived betrays no hint of real contrition. Three months ago he had to sheepishly say sorry when it emerged he’d been handed an obscenely-large bonus just for meeting the evidence deadline set by the inquiry.

This prompted MPs to demand his resignation or sacking for presiding over an organisation that remained, said one, “rotten to the core”.

But sacking isn’t enough for Nick. His name should live on as the byword for the mother and father of all bad weather – storms of such biblical proportions that people have to build an Ark to get out of the way. Future generations, as they wipe their wellies on the doormat, will not speak of raining cats and dogs but of “a real Nick Read out there”.

It would be a fair and equitable reckoning – which is more than his crummy computer system has ever managed.