Why didn’t ministers ask more questions when subpostmasters started to raise issues with the Horizon IT system? Labour’s Pat McFadden and Lib Dem leader Ed Davey were both postal affairs ministers while the scandal in the Post Office was starting to unfold, and both gave evidence to the inquiry today. Both offered effectively identical answers to that question. They both assumed the Post Office was telling them the truth.
Davey managed to have such an enjoyable election campaign that memories seem to have faded of his time in government when innocent men and women were being sent to prison for “crimes” that were in fact caused by a faulty IT system. But his evidence session was rather less comfortable than his stunts falling off paddleboards.
He had to consider whether he should have taken at face value the assurances he was given when he asked the Post Office about the claims being made by campaigning subpostmasters. So did McFadden.
“I had assumed that I was being told the truth,” Davey said, when asked by one of the lawyers why he hadn’t provided more scrutiny of the activities of a state entity that was sending people to prison. He apologised for failing to ask his questions more “forcefully”.
McFadden said similar. “When I look back on this, you know, I think of the terrible human consequences for the sub-postmasters who were prosecuted, even the ones who weren’t prosecuted but lost large sums of money or suffered damage in other ways – of course I wish I had asked more about this,” he said.
“But I do believe given the emphatic nature of the replies and the Post Office’s use of court judgments as a proof point for the robustness of the system, at this stage in the process… I believe they would have said exactly the same things in person as they were saying in the letters.”
There was an imbalance of credulity from the ministers and officials towards the Post Office and campaigners, in that whatever the Post Office seemed to say was treated as fact, while the sub-postmasters were always viewed with scepticism.
Davey’s office often replied to letters from MPs and campaigners stating assurances from the Post Office as fact, rather than checking the assertions separately.
In one instance, officials appeared to have cut and pasted something the Post Office had written to them into their own briefing to the minister, without any caveat that this was a mere assertion rather than something they had independently verified.
Davey admitted he was “surprised” to see the two documents side by side with identical wording. “I would have assumed I was being told the truth and that it was from my officials the best information they could provide with me,” he said.
It is easy to look back on the scandal now and ask why the ministers didn’t wonder if the Post Office was lying. McFadden said today he couldn’t quite work out when the Post Office went from thinking there was nothing wrong to knowing there was a problem with the system and lying about it.
“What I’m not clear about is at what point in their story does blind faith from the Post Office in their IT system, turn to something more sinister where people are just not telling the truth. Now, I don’t know at what point that happens,” he said. But at the time, the court judgements; the relationship between the arm’s-length body and the government; and the general tendency within Whitehall for people to believe they aren’t being lied to; all militated against that.
That last point, about people not thinking they are being lied to, is important. Most people outside Westminster assume that everyone is lying all the time, and that everyone else understands that. Within SW1, the culture is quite the opposite.
Lying is taboo, to the extent that MPs can’t even accuse one another of doing it in the Commons. Someone “accidentally misleads” the House: the whole row over the Standards Committee inquiry into Boris Johnson was about whether he “deliberately misled” MPs over Partygate.
Even outside the Chamber, journalists speak with advisers and ministers on the understanding that they won’t be lied to. Formulations such as “I haven’t seen that” or “we don’t recognise that” are a way of not-lying about something, but there is a basic belief in people telling the truth, even if within a very precise and tight definition of that.
I mention Johnson deliberately because his misleading of the Commons, and some of the claims made by his administration in its final days, undermined that belief – just as the way Post Office figures chose not to tell the truth have also undermined the confidence a minister can have that an arm’s-length body is replying with accurate information.
Today’s session suggested that from now on, the way politics operates needs to have a lot less credulity in it.