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

Henry Staunton has memo showing Post Office was told to ‘hobble’ into election

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 do a lot to substantiate Staunton’s original claim.

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’.

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.

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.