Badenoch under pressure as ex-Post Office chair produces written memo to support claim minister dismissed as lie – UK politics live

11 months ago 67

Good morning. After the former Post Office chair, Henry Staunton, gave an interview at the weekend making various allegations about the government’s response to the Horizon scandal, including claiming that he was told by a senior official to delay compensation payments, Kemi Badenoch, the businesss secretary, hit back. Whereas politicians in these circumstances normally only contest the parts of the negative story they can confidently refute, Badenoch went nuclear, and more or less dismissed everything Staunton was saying as a complete pack of lies.

Today that is not looking like such a wise strategy. Henry Staunton has now found a copy of the contemporaneous note he made of his conversation with the person he described to the Sunday Times as a senior civil servant and he has shown it to the Times. The official was Sarah Munby, who at the time was permanent secretary at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and the memo does a lot to substantiate Staunton’s original claim.

In his story for the Times, Oliver Shah reports:

Staunton’s first meeting with Munby came a month after he took over from Tim Parker in December 2022. His memo says that he told Munby that he “had been on over a dozen public company boards and not seen one with so many challenges”. It says that the board had identified a financial shortfall of £160 million as of September 2022 and that “there was a likelihood of a significant reduction in post offices if funding [from the government] was not [requested]”.

“Sarah was sympathetic to all of the above,” the memo says. “She understood the ‘huge commercial challenge’ and the ‘seriousness’ of the financial position. She described ‘all the options as unattractive’. However, ‘politicians do not necessarily like to confront reality’. This particularly applied when there was no obvious ‘route to profitability’.

“She said we needed to know that in the run-up to the election there was no appetite to ‘rip off the band aid’. ‘Now was not the time for dealing with long-term issues.’ We needed a plan to ‘hobble’ up to the election.”

In his interview at the weekend Staunton said he was told to hold up spending so the Post Office could “limp” into the election. In one respect his memory was faulty, because the word he recorded in his contemporaneous record was “hobble”. But that is a minor detail. On the substance of what was said, the written evidence backs up what was claimed in the interview.

In response, a government source has told the Times that Staunton is misrepresenting what he was told, either deliberately or because he was confused. Munby was not talking about compensation payments, the source suggested. They said:

The long-standing issues around Post Offices finances are a matter of public record and do not include postmaster compensation, which is being fully funded by the government. Henry Staunton is either confused or deliberately mixing up the two issues.

On the record, the government is also denying that Staunton was told to delay the payment of compensation. “The government has sped up compensation to victims, and consistently encouraged postmasters to come forward with their claims. To suggest any actions or conversations happened to the contrary is incorrect,” a spokesperson said.

But, although his memo implies Munby was was talking about overall Post Office finances, Staunton told the Times that by far the two biggest items where the Post Office was able to vary its spending were compensation payments and replacement of the Horizon system.

When it is hard to reconcile two conflicting accounts of a story, one reliable fallback is to consider which source is more reliable. And that is why it is particularly unfortunate for Badenoch that the new revelation coincides with the publication of a story in the Financial Times implying she has not been telling the truth about trade talks with Canada. In their story, George Parker, Lucy Fisher and Peter Campbell report:

Badenoch told MPs “explicitly” on January 29 that talks with Canada were “ongoing” to avoid a March 31 tariff cliff-edge for UK carmakers, even though she had earlier unilaterally paused wider trade talks with the Ottawa government

But the Canadian high commissioner to the UK, Ralph Goodale, has written to the House of Commons business select committee to insist Badenoch’s claimed talks, which also cover cheesemakers, have not happened.

With PMQs starting within the next three hours, both stories are likely to get referenced later in the Commons today. And that is before we even get started on the Gaza debate.

And at some point MPs will also want to address the story suggesting the UK no longer has a working nuclear deterrent. So it is going to be a busy day.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Metropolitan police, gives evidence to the London assembly’s police and crime committee.

12pm: Rishi Sunak faces Keir Starmer at PMQs.

After 12.45pm: MPs begin their debate on the SNP motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Voting should take place at around 4pm.

Afternoon: The Palestine Solidarity Campaign holds a rally outside parliament.

Also, in Wales, junior doctors have started a three-day strike.

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