Sir Ed Davey has suggested Paula Vennells, the former Post Office chief executive, lied to him over Horizon while he was a junior minister.
Sir Ed Davey has suggested Paula Vennells, the former Post Office chief executive, lied to him over Horizon while he was a junior minister.
“I now know I was being lied to” sums the little weasel up perfectly.
The political equivalent of “Not me guv, I was just walking by at that exact moment”.
Incidentally how convenient for the LibDems that this long running enquiry has only got round to questioning such a key player after the election has taken place thereby avoiding reports and headlines which might have compromised his party’s ability to flip Conservative seats.
His antics during the recent election campaign just reinforce the view that he’s a useless buffoon, well out of his depth, who should have been kept well away from any significant decision making. It would be good if the final report of the inquiry castigated him just as much as the other guilty parties, but I’m not holding my breath.
Both he and McFadden sound like they were totally disinterested in the job and did not bother to question what their officials told them.
This stage of the inquiry is telling us a lot about how government runs and how accurate Yes Minister was
Ah, but Otto, in ‘Yes Minister’ you at least had a sense that the civil service cared about the country. Not so reality.
Ottokring,
Most of this is just having a ministerial post for most MPs. You get the odd one like Gove at Education, where he wanted it, had plans for it, But a lot of them take a job they aren’t interested in and do as little as possible. Turn up to meetings, do some photo ops, the odd speech. But none of them care about being in charge.
Like my MP was the minister for something in the judiciary, but I knew from a friend who was a barrister that email was unreliable, so many cases had to be cancelled at short notice as evidence hadn’t been sent to the defence in advance. To most places I work in, that would be classed as a priority 1 bug. Email is operationally critical. The people right at the top of the organisation would know about it, and want updates every 2 hours. What’s my MP doing? Talking to kids at the local school about what an MP does or doing a photo op about a new post office opening.
Don’t care, he accepted the post and all the baubles that came and fawning by officials that came with it, well it also came with responsibilities.
File under: I was only following orders.
“You could have knocked me off a paddleboard!”
Tractor Gent said:
“His antics during the recent election campaign just reinforce the view that he’s a useless buffoon, well out of his depth, who should have been kept well away from any significant decision making.”
To be fair, that’s probably what they thought they were doing by making him Post Office Minister.
[email protected]
“A big boy (girl in this case) did it and ran away.”
I repeat, a pathetic little weasel as are all of his party for meekly standing by him and saying nothing.
The absolute minimum should be to take the feckers knighthood away.
Id stake a decent wager that at some point during his tenure he told parliament all was well at the PO.
Which is by recent track still Misleading Parliament – and cue calls for resignation etc etc.
In the state the LibDems were in, the job of the leader is to get as many people elected as possible so there’s a wider pool of talent to fish in to replace him. Something the Conservatives are going to have to face up to – when your group is reduced to a rump you’re forced to have whoever is left to fill your posts. The task of those people is to get some better talent to select from.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/19/paula-vennells-postmasters-had-fingers-tills-jo-swinson/
Another Lib Dem pointing the finger elsewhere. So at worst it’s going to come done to “She said She said” and Vennells has already been scapegoated.
Thank the Lord they’re never going to be anywhere near national power although they will feck up those 70+ constituencies who voted before thinking.
Ed Davey inherited a Department that had ALREADY adopted the line that “Horizon is wonderful the sub-postmasters must be lying” so I am willing to bet no-one ever told him that Horizon might be a dud. It is mildly interesting that only *after* the election do we get Pat McFadden, a New Labour minister, interrogated by the enquiry and we still haven’t had the minister who handed out the contract in 1999.
New Labour chose ICL, an IT *hardware* company created at the behest of Old Labour as their “national champion” and gave it a major *software* contract to develop a system for the Post Office. This suggests a level of ignorance or stupidity at the ministerial level allied to a failure of the Civil Service to live up to the claims of Gus O’Donnell or even Sir Humphrey, When I was 17 I knew that the software developed by IBM, by far the largest hardware manufacturer, was significantly inferior to Algol60 (or even that created by my local middle-aged genius geek) but it seems nobody had told Tony Blair or his team.
Eleven years later Vince Cable is put in charge of various things including the Post Office and inherits a pile a foot high of memoranda stating that “of course we the civil service are correct” and “all self-employed aren’t to be trusted because a fraction of 1% of them dodge VAT and NI”. So why blame Ed Davey?
Hopefully, the next time he falls into water a suitably large anvil will be attached.
ICL, like my former employer got out of the hardware and O/S business and into professional services. Needless to say for both it was a disaster. Sun Microsystem also attempted this on a smaller scale, as much good as it did them.
I guess IBM have done alright out of it, but they have a streak of ruthlessness a mile wide and their kit still has a lot of loyal customers ( although I thought AIX as an operating system stank ) to keep them afloat.
The thing though was that ICL was British and after a few bungs to party funds and nods and winks, Blair could point at a homegrown firm that could compete with the big boys.