There are few undisputed facts in the row between Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, and Henry Staunton, former chairman of the Post Office, over delayed compensation for post office operators. The central allegation is that the government wanted payment deferred so the cost would not have to be met this side of a general election.
In rejecting that assertion, Ms Badenoch impugned Mr Staunton’s motives and character. She told parliament on Monday that the charges were “baseless” and vengeful. The business secretary explained that her accuser was embittered after being sacked last month, adding also that he had been under investigation for bullying. Mr Staunton says he was unaware of any such investigation. He has countered with a memo, dating back to January 2023, summarising a conversation with a senior civil servant, in which he was told to avoid painful long-term financial decisions. It would be better, Mr Staunton’s note of the meeting records, if the government were allowed to “hobble” into an election with such issues unaddressed.
The government questions the accuracy of Mr Staunton’s account and asserts that financial issues under discussion did not include Horizon compensation. The same rebuttal was issued on Wednesday by Sarah Munby, the senior civil servant at the business department who is alleged to have requested the delay in payments. It is unclear why Mr Staunton would have mis-recorded a conversation a year before he knew he would be sacked.
The government’s defence is weaker in the assertion of urgency in wanting to compensate victims of the Horizon scandal before ITV broadcast its dramatised account of events last month. No such haste was communicated to the subpostmasters themselves.
Lack of prior interest was an aggravating factor in public outrage. Decades elapsed between the emergence of problems with Horizon – the IT fault that effectively caused innocent people to be treated as fraudsters – and government acknowledgment that there had been a most colossal miscarriage of justice.
Mr Staunton says he was told, when sacked, that the decision was necessary because someone had to “carry the can”. This is also denied by Ms Badenoch. For the business secretary, the row is about the future as well as the past. She is often cited as the frontrunner to succeed Rishi Sunak, following a Tory defeat at the next election. Her pugilistic approach to criticism was previously seen as a strength. Now, with the veracity of some of her statements to the Commons openly challenged, it looks reckless.
It doesn’t help that Ms Badenoch is simultaneously accused of misleading parliament on another matter – trade talks with Canada. She assured MPs last month that discussions were “ongoing”. This week, Ottawa’s high commissioner issued an unusually frank contradiction, noting that the talks have stalled.
The status of a cabinet pretender in some putative leadership contest is trivial compared to the plight of subpostmasters still awaiting adequate compensation. The content of discussions inside the business department may always be disputed. But it is reasonable to surmise that Ms Badenoch would not be in her present predicament if she had been as attentive to the Horizon case before it became a public scandal as she appears to have become afterwards.
In that respect, the episode is symptomatic of deeper malaise in a Conservative party that appears unable to distinguish between the shallow performance of government and the real thing.
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