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

Kemi Badenoch had dismissed everything Henry Staunton said as lies.

LIVE – Updated at 10:16

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

10:16

Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, was on the media round this morning, mostly to publicise the news that “Martha’s rule” is being adopted in 100 English hospitals from April at the start of a national rollout.

But Atkins was also asked about the Henry Staunton memo published by the Times this morning. (See 9.21am.) In an interview with Times Radio it was put to Atkins that the memo showed Kemi Badenoch was wrong to dismiss Staunton as a liar. Atkins replied:

From what I’ve seen in the papers, I would not say the note is as clear as that, but as I say, I can’t really be drawn into the detail of this.

The secretary of state set this out very, very clearly in the chamber. She cares deeply about this issue, as indeed does the minister, Kevin Hollinrake, who has done incredible work to try to secure justice and to get some answers for sub-postmasters. And I think really it is now for the Post Office, as a corporate body, to really get on with the job of helping deliver that justice for victims.

Keir Starmer was beaten up as teenager trying to defend gay friend, book reveals

10:08

Keir Starmer was beaten up in a nightclub in Cornwall as a teenager after trying to defend one of his friends who was attacked for being gay, a new book reveals. Pippa Crerar has the story.

09:53Libby Brooks

Shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray issued a plea to SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn to accept their “more balanced” amendment to the Gaza motion this morning, warning that without this all attempts to gather cross-party support for a ceasefire were “doomed to fail” because of the government majority.

Otherwise, he warned:

We will sit here tonight after all the votes have been counted and everything will have failed but the government’s [amendment] because it’s a question of mathematics.

My plea to the SNP all of last week was if you truly want parliament to speak with one voice let’s have a balanced motion that allows everyone to get behind it.

He said that if the SNP accepted the Labour amendment to their motion, which Murray argued takes a broader, recognising Israel’s position and making proposals for a pathway forward from the conflict, “then we can spend our time this morning trying to persuade government members to get behind it and perhaps there’s a better chance of something being passed rather than us just being defeated by the government”.

Labour’s Gaza amendment is chance to ‘speak with one voice’, says Nandy

09:51

Lisa Nandy, the shadow international development secretary, has said Labour’s amendment to the Scottish National party’s motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is a moment to “lift our debate up” away from party politics and “speak with one voice”. Geneva Abdul has the story here.

Badenoch under pressure as ex-Post Office chair produces written memo to support claim that minister dismissed as lie

09:48

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 a lot to substantiate Staunton’s original claim.

In his story for the Times, Oliver Shah reports:

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’.

“She said we needed to know that in the run-up to the election there was no appetite to ‘rip off the band aid’. ‘Now was not the time for dealing with long-term issues.’ We needed a plan to ‘hobble’ up to the election.”

In his interview at the weekend Staunton said he was told to hold up spending so the Post Office could “limp” into the election. In one respect his memory was faulty, because the word he recorded in his contemporaneous record was “hobble”. But that is a minor detail. On the substance of what was said, the written evidence backs up what was claimed in the interview.

In response, a government source has told the Times that Staunton is misrepresenting what he was told, either deliberately or because he was confused. Munby was not talking about compensation payments, the source suggested. They said:

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.

On the record, the government is also denying that Staunton was told to delay the payment of compensation. “The government has sped up compensation to victims, and consistently encouraged postmasters to come forward with their claims. To suggest any actions or conversations happened to the contrary is incorrect,” a spokesperson said.

But, although his memo implies Munby was was talking about overall Post Office finances, Staunton told the Times 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.

When it is hard to reconcile two conflicting accounts of a story, one reliable fallback is to consider which source is more reliable. And that is why it is particularly unfortunate for Badenoch that the new revelation coincides with the publication of a story in the Financial Times implying she has not been telling the truth about trade talks with Canada. In their story, George Parker, Lucy Fisher and Peter Campbell report:

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.

With PMQs starting within the next three hours, both stories are likely to get referenced later in the Commons today. And that is before we even get started on the Gaza debate.

And at some point MPs will also want to address the story suggesting the UK no longer has a working nuclear deterrent. So it is going to be a busy day.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Metropolitan police, gives evidence to the London assembly’s police and crime committee.

12pm: Rishi Sunak faces Keir Starmer at PMQs.

After 12.45pm: MPs begin their debate on the SNP motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Voting should take place at around 4pm.

Afternoon: The Palestine Solidarity Campaign holds a rally outside parliament.

Also, in Wales, junior doctors have started a three-day strike.

If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line; privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate); or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.

Lib Dems urge PM’s ethics adviser to launch inquiry into whether Badenoch misled parliament

09:48

The Liberal Democrats have written to Sir Laurie Magnus, the prime minister’s ethics adviser, asking for an investigation into whether Kemi Badenoch has broken the ministerial code by knowingly misleading parliament.

In her letter, Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader, said that Badenoch described Henry Staunton’s claims as “completely false” in the Commons on Monday. Referring to the new evidence published by the Times today (see 9.21am), Cooper says:

Given that Mr Staunton continues to stand by his allegations, there is a clear question as to who is telling the truth and whether Kemi Badenoch has knowingly misled parliament. It is clearly in the public interest for the facts of this important matter to be determined. In your role as ethics adviser, I urge you to open an investigation into this matter and accordingly determine whether or not a breach of the code has been committed by the secretary of state.

Subpostmasters who are at the heart of this whole scandal deserve justice, financial redress and the truth.

Normally the ethics advisers (technically known as the independent adviser on ministers’ interests) only launches an inquiry into a minister at the request of the PM. And yesterday Rishi Sunak defended Badenoch’s response to the Staunton allegations.

But under revised terms of reference published two years ago, the adviser can initiate an investigation himself. If that happens, the PM has the right to veto it, but in those circumstances the adviser can insist on reasons for this being made public (unless there is a good reason for keeping that decision private, such as national security).