Kemi Badenoch has accused the Post Office chair she sacked of a “blatant attempt to seek revenge” after he made explosive allegations about the government’s handling of the Horizon scandal.
The business secretary launched an extended attack on Henry Staunton in the Commons on Monday, and claimed that he was under investigation for bullying when she fired him.
The extraordinary war of words began over the weekend after Staunton gave an interview to the Sunday Times accusing the government of wanting to stall compensation payments to victims of the Horizon scandal until after the general election.
Badenoch dismissed Staunton from his role last month. In his interview Staunton said that Badenoch told him when she fired him: “Well, someone’s got to take the rap for this.”
He also claimed that soon after starting his role in December 2022, he was instructed by a senior civil servant to delay compensation payouts so the Conservatives could “limp into” the general election.
Badenoch accused Staunton of a series of “completely false” accusations, telling MPs there was no proof that Staunton had been told to delay payments and that such an approach would be “mad”.
“There is no evidence whatsoever that this is true,” she said. “We have no evidence whatsoever that any official said this, and actually, if such a thing was said, it is for Mr Staunton himself to bring the evidence.
“It is very hard to refute a negative. People just making wild baseless accusations and then demanding proof that they didn’t happen are mischief making in my view.
“There would be no benefit whatsoever of us delaying compensation,” Badenoch added. “This does not have any significant impact on revenues whatsoever. It would be a mad thing to even suggest, and the compensation scheme which Mr Staunton oversaw has actually been completed, and my understanding is 100% of payments have been made, so clearly no instruction was given.
“I would hope that most people reading the interview in yesterday’s Sunday Times would see it for what it was: a blatant attempt to seek revenge following dismissal,” she said.
Badenoch also told the Commons that Staunton had been under investigation for bullying when he was dismissed and that “concerns were brought” to her department that he was refusing to cooperate.
She said: “I dismissed him because there were serious concerns about his behaviour as chair, including those raised from other directors on the board … I should also inform the house that while he was in post a formal investigation was launched into allegations made regarding Mr Staunton’s conduct. This included serious matters such as bullying. Concerns were brought to my department’s attention about Mr Staunton’s willingness to cooperate with that investigation.”
On Monday night, Staunton issued a stinging riposte to Badenoch, saying he had kept a record of the alleged comment from a senior civil servant asking him to stall compensation payments to Horizon victims. A spokesperson for Staunton said he “recorded [it] at the time in a file note, which he emailed to himself and to colleagues and which is therefore traceable on the Post Office server”.
The spokesperson said Staunton had never been made aware of any bullying allegations against him and that they were “certainly not raised by the secretary of state at any stage and certainly not during the conversation which led to Mr Staunton’s dismissal. Such behaviour would in any case be totally out of character.”
They added: “It was in the interests of the business as well as being fair for the postmasters that there was faster progress on exoneration and that compensation for wrongly convicted postmasters was more generous, but we didn’t see any real movement until after the Mr Bates programme. We will leave it to others to come to the conclusion as to why that was the case.”
The shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, earlier called for a full Cabinet Office investigation and said ministers must ensure claims the government had sought to stall Horizon compensation payments were “shown to be false in no uncertain terms”.
He said: “Yet we do now have two completely contrasting accounts, one from the chairman of the Post Office, and one from the secretary of state, and only one of these accounts can be the truth.”
James Arbuthnot, the Tory peer who has been one of the leading campaigners on the scandal, said that what Staunton alleged happened was “disgraceful” but that ministers should now focus on delivering quick compensation.
“What I think we need to concentrate on is holding the government’s feet to the fire, making sure that compensation is paid quickly and effectively and generously, and overturning these convictions as quickly and expeditiously as we can,” Lord Arbuthnot said.
“Although if true, it’s a disgraceful story, things have moved on. I’m not really interested in a ‘Did he say this? Did she say that?’ battle. I’m interested in getting the payments to the subpostmasters as quickly as possible.”
In his Sunday Times interview, Staunton had said: “Early on, I was told by a fairly senior person to stall on spend on compensation and on the replacement of Horizon and to limp, in quotation marks – I did a file note on it – limp into the election.
“It was not an anti-postmaster thing, it was just straight financials. I didn’t ask, because I said: ‘I’m having no part of it – I’m not here to limp into the election, it’s not the right thing to do by postmasters.’ The word ‘limp’ gives you a snapshot of where they were.”
Badenoch reacted furiously to the claims on Sunday, publishing a thread on X accusing Staunton of having “given an interview full of lies about our conversation during his dismissal”.
On Monday evening, the Department for Business and Trade circulated its short “meeting note” on the call in which Badenoch dismissed Staunton. The note said Badenoch had “received a briefing on the governance issues at the Post Office and that the complaints against HS [Henry Staunton] are so serious that the government need to intervene”.
