This morning’s papers report the latest twist in the bitter row between Kemi Badenoch and Henry Staunton, the now former chairman of the Post Office: the discovery of a memo of his meeting with Sarah Munby, then permanent secretary at BEIS, at which she apparently warned him not to “rip off the band aid” ahead of an election by accelerating payments to sub-postmasters.
It’s an extraordinary document, and not just because a senior civil servant apparently refers to bandages as “band aids”.
According to the Times, Munby told Staunton, at a meeting on January 5 of last year, that “politicians do not necessarily like to confront reality”, and that “now was not the time for dealing with long-term issues”; instead, the goal was to try and save money in order to “limp into the election”.
Now, Staunton wrote this memo himself. But it is contemporaneous: he forwarded a copy of it to the Post Office’s CEO the following day, so it’s not as if he has simply conjured this out of thin air.
Moreover, it’s hardly impossible to imagine someone making the arguments Munby appears to have done. So many of this country’s problems stem from subordinating long-term spending decisions to short-term political priorities, or massaging them to fit into five-year spending windows. As I noted in a previous piece, in British politics the time to deal with the long term never actually arrives. Why should the Post Office be exempt?
Likewise, it is not uncommon for the Government to produce perverse outcomes by starting at the number it wants to hit, be that cash saved or immigration cut, and working backwards. Big, structural reform would be controversial and take time to pay off, so things perceived as easy targets end up on the chopping block. Thus:
“Although the note suggests that Munby was referring to the Post Office’s overall finances, Staunton said that by far the two biggest items where the Post Office was able to vary its spending were compensation payments and replacement of the Horizon system.”
Yet if the policy story is rather same-old same-old, the politics of this is rather spicier. Because it was only this week that Kemi Badenoch was denouncing Staunton in the strongest terms for peddling “a series of falsehoods” in pursuit of “revenge” for her decision to ask him to step down in the wake of the belated furore over the Horizon scandal.
It may yet prove that the bullying allegations against him she describes were real, although he insists that they were never brought to his attention before the Business Secretary asked for his resignation, which if true seems like something of a denial of due process.
Yet as for her claim that his description of the Government’s handling of the sub-postmasters’ issue was “baseless”, well, the memo to which he referred in the original interview appears to exist. Serve returned.
Of course, it does not follow that Munby said what she said (if she did) on direct instruction from a minister. Badenoch would not be the first minister tripped up by being held accountable without the Civil Service having provided all the facts (one thinks of Amber Rudd).
But fair or not, the Business Secretary’s position seems suddenly a little precarious.