Former South Warnborough sub-postmistress Jo Hamilton has written a book about how she was caught up in the Post Office scandal.<br />She was featured alongside lead campaigner Alan Bates at the centre of television drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office which brought the faults in the Post Office’s Horizon computer system to the attention of the nation.<br />Jo, born in Portsmouth in 1957, had previously worked for the MoD, lived in West Germany as an Army wife, been a carer for the elderly, driven trucks and run one of the roughest pubs in Aldershot.<br />But even all that life experience could not prepare her for the horrors in store when she took on the seemingly quiet life of running the South Warnborough village shop and post office in 2001.<br />The failures of Horizon, and the subsequent cover-up, saw Jo plead guilty to 14 charges of false accounting for trying to make her books balance to avoid a more serious charge of stealing £36,644.89 from the Post Office. She was given a community order and put on probation.<br />Eventually her conviction was overturned, alongside those of many others, as the scandal was exposed - and now Jo has added published author to her varied curriculum vitae as she tells her story in Why Are You Here, Mrs Hamilton?
