Kemi Badenoch v the Post Office is a great political soap opera. Like much good TV, however, it distracts us from reality. The business secretary fired Henry Staunton, the former chair of the Post Office, in January. A month later, Staunton told the Sunday Times that Sarah Munby, a senior civil servant, instructed him to slow compensation payments to victims of the Horizon scandal. Badenoch then launched an extraordinary character assassination from the dispatch box in the House of Commons, claiming Staunton had been fired after accusations of bullying (she originally told the public he had left by “mutual consent”). It’s not clear which story is true, but the prime minister notably refused to repeat Badenoch’s claims.
The row has become an embarrassingly public case of “he said, she said”. Staunton’s note of the meeting records the conversation with Munby, but not the exact words. Munby denies Staunton’s account; she also kept a note of the meeting, but too much of it is redacted to know whose story it supports. All of this is ultimately a perfect distraction from Staunton’s real revelations: the Post Office is rotten at its core and the government is unwilling to do much about it. The Horizon compensation schemes, whether by design or good old-fashioned incompetence, seem likely to frustrate victims’ claims. The “overturned convictions” scheme, which is supposed to provide compensation to those who were wrongly convicted, didn’t open until three years after the court of appeal exposed the “most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history”. Most victims are yet to receive a penny. Payouts from the other programmes are as low as £15.75.
