Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey is facing resignation calls over his role in the Post Office scandal where a rogue software system led to the wrongful criminal convictions of over 700 sub-postmasters. 

Davey was postal affairs minister during 2010 to 2012 and former branch managers said they were “fobbed off” at the time. Victims of the scandal said Davey has serious questions to answer.

Renewed interest in the scandal follows a popular dramatisation from ITV, Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The four-part drama follows Alan Bates, played by Toby Jones, as he fights for justice after hundreds of his fellow postmasters and postmistresses were accused of fraud and theft when faulty computers claimed that money had gone missing. 

A spokesperson for Davey said he “completely understands the anger of the victims who suffered from this appalling miscarriage of justice” but that the Post Office and other ministers had lied to him “on an industrial scale”.

“In hindsight he wishes he could have done more to help them,” they added.

In an ironic twist, it has been reported that Davey has called for others’ resignations 31 times on since 2019. Even worse for Davey, he apparently made a cool £275,000 as a consultant with the law firm that represented the Post Office, Herbert Smith Freehills. Davey claims his work for the firm was unrelated to the case.

Economic secretary to the Treasury Bim Afolami told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 that Davey failed his duties as a minister: “To be honest, I’m not one who goes around saying that [someone] needs to resign, but I do think he needs to … be honest with people and explain why, as a minister, he didn’t ask the right questions.

“In my job, you get a huge amount of information, there are a lot of people in the civil service who are working very hard on your behalf, but what you have to do is you have to ask the key questions and interrogate what you’re told. And I think that Sir Ed needs to explain what he was told why he allowed certain things to develop in the way that they did.”

Seema Misra, a postmistress who was jailed in November 2010 while pregnant said that Davey should quit.

She said: “He was in a position of power, and he could have stepped forward to find out what was going on. He could have turned the whole thing around, but he chose not to. He’s definitely liable.”

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Sunday that the government was trying to find a way to pardon those wrongly convicted and today his spokesperson said the PM would fully support the Forfeiture Committee looking into former Post Office boss Paula Vennells’ CBE. 

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