Davey is a diversion in Post Office blame game

If Lib Dem leader Ed Davey were to resign over the Post Office scandal, his party would have time to recover, most likely under his capable deputy Daisy Cooper, before the general election, expected in the autumn.

In fact, far from damaging Lib Dem chances, his departure might even be a boost for party hopefuls and his often sanctimonious contributions in the Commons would certainly not be missed.

The MP, who makes a habit of demanding public figure resignations, 34 at the last count, including baiting Boris Johnson 18 times, emerged this week as a focal point of anger over the treatment of sub-postmasters wrongly accused of stealing money.

As postal affairs minister from 2010 to 2012, Davey initially refused to meet Alan Bates, the postmaster turned campaigner and star of the ITV drama, Mr Bates Vs the Post Office, that has made the long-running saga overnight headline news and prompted belated government redress.

Davey appears to have dismissed concerns about the Post Office’s faulty Horizon software, which led to the victimisation of hundreds of Post Office workers. He was also, later, a highly paid consultant with the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills which acted for the Post Office.

But while his role in the debacle is a stain on his reputation, he does not deserve to be scapegoated and singling him out is both petty and partisan.

Apart from the fact that there are more obvious and culpable villains – and at the top of the list, Paula Vennells, the Post Office chief executive, has already been pressured into handing back her gong (though not her bonuses), Davey is a distraction to the process of making amends.

He is an easy target for the Tory right, given his propensity for seeking the moral high ground and because he is a Liberal Democrat.

So brazenly unbalanced was the attack on Sir Ed (knighted in 2016 for political and public service) by GB News hosts Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg that the Lib Dems have asked Ofcom to investigate the channel over alleged impartiality breaches.

Cooper said the Lib Dems were not offered a right of reply and that the politically motivated commentary from the likes of Rees-Mogg did not mention “his own party’s role in this devastating miscarriage of justice”.

We must await tonight’s diatribe by Lee Anderson, deputy chairman of the Conservatives, who was first to call for Davey to start “clearing his desk, clearing his diary and clear off”. Cooper said, with some understatement, that she had no confidence he would be impartial.

But even more moderate Tories have put Davey in the firing line. In an otherwise excellent piece in the Times this week, Daniel Finkelstein suggested the Lib Dem should go, not because he was uniquely culpable but as an act of leadership, “to become the spokesman and symbol for the people arguing that those who erred must be brought to book”.

So persuasive is Finkelstein that I was almost convinced but, no, it is not Davey’s job to take on the enormous wrongs of the worst wrongdoers at the Post Office by being the political fall guy.

Davey was Post Office minister for just two years, within the Coalition government, after the rot had begun under the last Labour administration. But it is successive Tory governments that have presided over the years of inaction and done the least to ensure justice was done.

The fact that it is a Tory MP, James Arbuthnot, who is the hero of postmasters does not exonerate the whole party.

Lord Arbuthnot, who did listen to his constituents when they alerted him to their plight, said he did not blame any single cabinet minister when “all of them ought to have been more questioning, particularly when so many MPs were raising issues”.

“No party comes out of this at all well,” he said on Talk TV.

Alan Bates also downplayed Davey’s guilt, saying on Newsnight that he was merely one of many ministers in the post during the scandal.

It is a sign of the Conservatives’ desperation that they are trying to shift the Post Office fall-out to their political foes, not just Davey but Sir Keir Starmer, who as director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013 has been quizzed on what he knew of up to 38 prosecutions of Post Office operators initiated by the Crown Prosecution Service.

Rishi Sunak’s scramble to put things right comes too late for many postmasters and even if he delivers a package that satisfies the majority, Tory fortunes will not be revived on the back of it.

The focus should not be on stray politicians who had walk-on roles, but on the real baddies. As Arbuthnot said, there are so many people to blame that nobody has taken the blame, but now those most responsible for ruining lives must be held to account.

That includes Vennells and her executives, and the investigators who hounded innocent postal workers, bullies such as Stephen Bradshaw who gave evidence yesterday to the Horizon public inquiry where he was accused of behaving like a Mafia gangster.

Arbuthnot also named senior civil servant Alex Chisholm, who was permanent secretary in the Department of Business when the litigation was begun, and Susan Crichton, the former general counsel of the Post Office.

And the Japanese company Fujitsu, which supplied the IT system and has subsequently been awarded government contracts worth billions, must be made to pay for fleecing not just the postmasters but the British public as compensation costs mount.

Eventual closure for the sub-postmasters community will involve prosecutions and possible jail terms for some of the Post Office perpetrators, but as the dust settles, politicians on all sides will discover there is no political capital to be gained here.

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