At what point does a minister decide they are being lied to? That was the question Pat McFadden and Ed Davey had to consider as they gave evidence to the Post Office Inquiry. Both were confronted with evidence of Post Office figures assuring them nothing was wrong when subpostmasters and their MPs were raising concerns – and of their own officials repeating those assertions as fact, rather than checking for themselves.
At one stage, one of the lawyers asking questions took Davey to a document written by the Post Office, and then asked him to compare it to a briefing then prepared by his officials:
The entirety of the information in the sections that I’ve read to you appears to be a cut and paste from the Post Office briefing. They’ve right clicked, swiped, cut and paste or copied and paste. Is that what would would expect to have happened by your officials when they were briefing you and not attributed it to Post Office?
Davey replied: ‘It is not what I’d have expected. When I saw the documents in the bundle you sent to me it became obvious that there had been that cut and paste as you say, and it surprised me.’
Officials clearly felt they could trust that they were not being lied to. Perhaps that was once justified but this scandal and many others have underlined that there should be no such credulity offered even within government and its arms length bodies because people, even respectable-looking ones, do lie.
Similarly, McFadden said that whenever MPs raised concerns with him about constituents being prosecuted by the Post Office, he received such confident assertions that there were no problems with the Horizon systems, that he had no reason to probe further:
When I look back on this, you know, I think of the terrible human consequences for the subpostmasters 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. 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.
McFadden was a minister when the Post Office was prosecuting subpostmasters for something they hadn’t done. Fourteen years later, he is a minister again, now in the Cabinet Office. He told the inquiry that he felt it was unworkable for ministers to be the ones who carried out the scrutiny of arms-length government bodies, but that he wanted its chair to consider whether a new body could be set up to perform that task. What he didn’t say was that this body would only work to stop another scandal if its default assumption was that it couldn’t trust what it was being told.
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