In my continuing series on the Post Office Horizon scandal (see here, here, here and here), I have been writing about UK government IT companies that have been too big to fail since the mid-1960s.

These began with ICL, envisaged to become a rival to IBM (hah!), which Fujitsu later bought. ICL Pathway evolved into Fujitsu UK’s Horizon software system in use at the Post Office. Hundreds of postmasters and postmistresses in the UK found themselves turned into criminals for shortfalls that can only be blamed on faulty software.

On Wednesday, January 10, 2024, Ian Hislop, the long-time editor of Private Eye magazine, appeared on Robert Peston’s ITV current affairs programme to discuss the scandal. Private Eye was one of the earliest publications to do a deep dive into what was happening. They began reporting on it regularly beginning in 2011, although it seemed much earlier. Computer Weekly began its reporting on the scandal in 2009.

In the introduction to the segment with Hislop, Anushka Asthana recaps the Horizon timeline, which began in 1999, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister. She says that Labour MP Harriet Harman, now Mother of the House of Commons for her lengthy tenure as MP, pointed out at the time that Horizon had serious flaws. Peston’s interview with Hislop follows. Hislop says that a lot of people have questions to answer. The two segments are just over five minutes long in total:

Anushka Asthana says that there were 17 Post Office ministers in place and 16 different trade ministers as the Horizon scandal unfolded. Strangely, Harriet Harman has stayed quiet on the issue. Her input would be invaluable.

Yet, little was done until 2019 when Conservative ministers began looking at it more closely. Their work continues today, although not to the satisfaction of everyone involved. In any event, an inquiry into the scandal continues.

Fujitsu UK’s former head is MP’s husband

Before I get to the Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, here is a Conservative MP with a tie to Fujitsu UK.

Gillian Keegan, our current Education Secretary, is married to Michael Keegan, whom the Mail said, on January 4, headed the IT company at the height of the scandal (purple emphases mine):

Michael Keegan was the UK Chief Executive and Chairman of Fujitsu, the firm behind the botched computer system that caused the entire problem, when the cover-up was at its height.

A 2014 press release announcing his appointment hailed his 30 years of experience in the IT sector, telling readers that prior to joining the Japanese tech giant he’d held ‘senior roles at the Royal Mail Group/Post Office Limited’.

Times change, however, and these days Keegan, who is the husband of Rishi Sunak’s education secretary Gillian Keegan, runs a mile from any suggestion that he might bear any responsibility for the sub-postmaster scandal.

To that end, he’s publicly stressed that, during his time as CEO, he only made one decision related to Horizon, and that was to cancel a tender to provide a new version of the system to the Post Office.

Furthermore, Keegan has insisted he only ever had one conversation with Vennells, at which the affair was not discussed.

The ongoing inquiry into the scandal will tell us more about the role Fujitsu had to play and the culpability of its various executives. However, the Government has certainly taken Keegan at his word: in 2018, he was made a ‘Crown representative’ of the Cabinet Office, working primarily with the Ministry of Defence.

He also sits on the advisory board of the Prince’s Trust and is a non-executive director of an IT firm called Centerprise, which in May won a £1 million contract linked (controversially, given his wife’s job) to the schools rebuilding programme.

Amazing — and not in a good way.

The Mail is correct in saying that Michael Keegan is staying silent about this. Even his late father’s Wikipedia entry states:

In 2017 his son’s wife Gillian Keegan was elected Conservative MP for Chichester.^[13]

Gillian Keegan’s entry gives us his name at least, but notice how his Cabinet Office appointment overshadows his time at Fujitsu:

Michael Keegan is a former Head of Fujitsu UK and Ireland, appointed in 2014. He later had a role as a crown representative to the Cabinet Office, managing cross-government relationships with BAE Systems as a strategic supplier to the Government.^[41][42]

Sir Ed Davey

January’s big splashes about the scandal involved Sir Ed Davey, the current leader of the Liberal Democrats.

The Mail article says:

Sir Ed Davey’s journey to the leadership of Britain’s third party began in 2010, when he was appointed Minister for Postal Affairs in the coalition government. 

In May that year, a letter landed on his desk from Alan Bates, the wrongly-convicted postmaster at the centre of ITV’s new TV series.

‘Many people have been sent to prison, lost businesses and homes and faced financial ruin by an organisation that will stop at nothing to keep the true facts behind its failing IT system from being exposed,’ it read. ‘In writing to you on behalf of the group, I am asking for a meeting where we can present our case to you.’

Davey wrote back, primly informing Bates that this staggering miscarriage of justice was ‘an operational and contractual matter’ for the Post Office. The future Lib Dem leader concluded: ‘I do not believe a meeting would serve any useful purpose.’

Fast forward to 2017 and Bates led a group litigation against the Post Office. It responded by hiring attack-dog lawyers from City firm Herbert Smith Freehills to fight its corner. At this point, Davey makes a second ugly appearance in the scandal. For in June that year, he agreed to be taken on by Herbert Smith Freehills as a ‘consultant on political issues and policy analysis’, earning £5,000 a month, for six hours’ work — £833 an hour.

While Sir Ed never worked on the Horizon case, he continued to be paid by the law firm throughout the ill-fated proceedings, only relinquishing the role in 2022.

Asked about the affair this week, Davey said he regrets not doing more but claimed to have been ‘deeply misled’ by Post Office executives.

Here is the letter that Davey sent to Alan Bates:

Another Mail article that appeared on January 4, after ITV’s docudrama Mr Bates versus The Post Office ended, says that Conservative MPs and a Conservative peer dispute Davey’s explanation of events:

Lib Dem leader Ed Davey has been accused of ‘airbrushing’ his involvement in the fallout from the Post Office IT scandal …

… yesterday Tory MP Paul Scully, who had ministerial responsibility for postal affairs from 2020 to 2022, accused Sir Ed of failing to challenge the officials. He said: ‘He’s now airbrushing that he didn’t ask questions at the time. It doesn’t feel like he was asking robust enough questions.

‘He is trying to palm it off as something that happened ten years ago. He’s not a bit-part player in this.’

Former trade minister Sir John Redwood said Sir Ed was among those who ‘let subpostmasters down’. 

He added: ‘I just couldn’t believe that at the same time a new computer system came into use, post workers suddenly decided to all go rogue… and I and others told them to investigate. And where was Davey in all of this? Unfortunately, he just kept quiet.

‘Ministers are given information all the time, and they don’t have to accept it. But he did. He embarrassed himself, because he didn’t pursue it.’

The Horizon scandal saw more than 700 subpostmasters prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft, fraud and false accounting after the faulty software made it appear that money had gone missing from their branches.

Some went to prison, while others lost their homes and life savings trying to repay the ‘lost’ money. At least four are believed to have taken their own lives …

Conservative peer Lord Arbuthnot, who led calls for a judge-led inquiry into Horizon, said: ‘The line Ed Davey took in 2010 in writing to Alan Bates was the same as the line the previous Government had taken in writing to me in 2009.

‘In my view it was quite wrong, because the Government owned the Post Office and had all the responsibilities of ownership.

‘That included the duty to ensure that its organisation, the Post Office, behaved in an ethical way.’

A Lib Dem spokesman said: ‘It’s disappointing to see Conservative MPs choosing to turn this issue into a political football instead of focusing on getting justice and compensation for the victims.’

Past history

My many bookmarks on Ed Davey are revealing.

For those unfamiliar with him, he is one of the House of Commons’ biggest moralists and finger-pointers.

Party leadership contest

Beginning with Guido Fawkes’s posts from 2020, we discover that, even though the Lib Dems’ official line was to oppose Chinese involvement in British technology, Davey seems to have taken a contribution from Huawei to further his party leadership campaign after the previous leader, Jo Swinson, lost her seat so spectacularly in December 2019’s general election. At this point, Davey was the Party’s Acting Leader.

Guido posted the following on July 8, 2020 with a screen grab of supporting documentation (red emphases his):

Since Guido’s Monday story on Ed Davey’s LibDem leadership fundraising hypocrisy, tens of thousands more leadership funds have been added to his register of members interests. One donation of £5,000 caught Guido’s eye – from Sir Michael Rake, who was appointed to the board of Huawei UK in April, and who’s served as an adviser to the Chinese-based company since January 2019.

The LibDems have long been an anti-Huawei party, with Daisy Cooper MP – who recently made the surprise announcement of backing Davey for leader – saying the Government’s decision to allow Huawei control over parts of the UK’s 5G network shows the Tories have “little regard for Huawei’s human rights record.” Huawei’s advisers don’t splash the cash because of their support for liberal democracy….

Two days later on July 10, he got a bit over-excited about winning the leadership contest:

He claimed that nearly 60% of members were backing him to be leader, actually that was the percentage of the nominations he got. Voting has yet to begin and his tweet was deleted minutes later. Is that nominations tally even that much of a strong performance?

On July 16, he had to apologise to talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer after he accused her of being on the Downing Street payroll. (Whaaat?) Guido has the accompanying evidence — a tweet and a video:

Sir Ed Davey has privately apologised to Julia Hartley-Brewer after accusing her of being on the No. 10 payroll during a feisty TalkRadio interview this morning. Watch the bust-up above…

Julia now has informed her followers that following the shouting match over whether NHS England should take responsibility for some of the mistakes made throughout the pandemic, or whether No. 10 should ultimately be accountable, Sir Ed has privately texted her to apologise for the accusation.

On August 6, he was found guilty of a second data breach in his campaigning among Party members:

On August 27, Ed Davey won the leadership contest.

However, strangely enough, just a few days later on September 6, he was unable to offer any clear Lib Dem policies. On September 8, he could not say whether his party wanted to rejoin the EU.

2021: Earn, baby, earn

In August 2021, Davey did an about-face on the Lib Dems’ stance on Afghanistan.

On August 18, he reacted in the Commons to Joe Biden’s and the UK’s subsequent withdrawal from the country:

Ed Davey’s LibDems have been going in hard on Afghanistan, both calling for a greater number of refugees to be allowed into the UK and strongly condemning the US & UK military withdrawal, saying “our leaders should all hang their heads in shame” …

In the Commons this morning, Davey slammed the “frightening failure to achieve the aim of this whole mission, the aim of keeping British people safe from international terrorists trained in Taliban Afghanistan.” How times change…

Back at the LibDems’ 2009 conference, their future leader was instead calling for “tea with the Taliban”, and for Taliban fighters to be offered “a decent daily wage” to get them to defect. Now he criticises the withdrawal of troops …

But the real story for that year was how much he made from work outside of Parliament. He was raking it in.

On November 8, Guido told us that Davey made far more from work outside the Commons than the SNP’s then-Westminster leader Ian Blackford (£38,967) and Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer (£25,934.18):

All the recent publicity means you may be in the market to hire a politician for yourself. Don’t mess about with backbenchers, go to the top and rent a party leader by the hour. Guido has gone into the declarations of the leaders of the parties who are going to spend the afternoon attacking Tory sleaze. All are available to rent by the hour at competitive rates:

• • The biggest earning leader is the LibDem’s Ed Davey, who makes £78,000-a-year for 120 hours work from his side hustles …

And yet, all three chose to attack a then-Conservative MP, eventually turfed out for ‘sleaze’, for pursuing outside work:

Worth reflecting on how much they make from their own side hustles when they attack Owen Paterson later this afternoon…

Oh, the hypocrisy.

On November 29, Guido reported that Davey himself was investigated for his whopping £78,000 in extra earnings:

It now transpires Parliament’s Standards Commissioner is taking a second look at Davey’s earnings. It’s been spotted that last week he became the first MP since the sleaze scandal broke to be placed under investigation by Kathryn Stone for “Registration and declaration of an interest under the Guide to the Rules” …

2022: more hypocrisy

Chinese donations came back to haunt Davey on January 13, 2022:

The spy scandal enveloping Westminster this afternoon has already forced Barry Gardiner [Labour] and Alan Mak [Conservative] to put water between them and accused CCP informant Christine Lee. Guido, however, can reveal a further connection: LibDem leader Ed Davey. According to Sir Ed’s register of interests his local branch accepted a £5,000 donation from Lee in November 2013.

Putting the donation to Ed Davey, a spokesman told Guido the leader is shocked by the revelations, although today’s email from Mr Speaker was the “first time he has been given cause to be concerned about a donation to his local party association received in 2013” …

Coincidentally, in 2013 he was Secretary of State for Energy, in which role he went off to China to usher in their investment in Sizewell C; something subsequent governments have been trying to unwind. It’s not Ed’s only questionable Chinese-linked donation. As Guido revealed in 2020, he also pocketed £5,000 from Huawei’s chief advisor…

On January 19, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson had a humorous go at Davey from the despatch box, in Mandarin no less:

That summer, on July 18, by which time Boris had recently resigned, more of Davey’s hypocrisy came to light from his time as Energy Minister during the Coalition years, this time on fracking:

Amongst the trials and tribulations of the Tory leadership contest, the minor parties have had to do more to reclaim some share of the media spotlight. It is in this context that the Liberal Democrats have tried to weigh in, with Ed Davey calling on all candidates to support a fracking ban. This looks like an attempt to stick up for the faux environmentalism of home county NIMBYs…

What Ed Davey has failed to mention in making his newly articulated tree-hugging pitch to Surrey SUV drivers is his own past enthusiasm for the very thing he’s opposing. While serving as Energy Secretary, the LibDem leader was amongst the biggest advocates of the fracking industry. Speaking in 2012 as a member of the coalition government, Ed proclaimed “There is an awful lot of nonsense talked about fracking… I love shale gas”. He also voted against plans to ban fracking. Clearly Davey is desperate to disavow his legacy in government to appease the climate critics, even if it means opposing measures to bring down fuel prices. It’s not exactly the first time the Liberal Democrats have switched positions when they think it suits them…

2023: even more hypocrisy

On March 27, 2023, the Lib Dems attempted to portray themselves as transparent via Davey’s tax returns. Guido has the report but remains unconvinced:

In the interest of “tax transparency“, LibDem Leader Ed Davey has quietly published a one-page summary of his tax returns for the past two years. Not that you’d know it: there’s been zero coverage and no mention on Davey’s – or the LibDems’ – social media profiles. The “tax transparency” page is currently impossible to find anywhere on the website, including “latest news”, unless you have the direct link…

The “summary” shows he paid £18,043 in income tax in 2020-21, and £18,011 in 2021-22, with employment earnings of just under £77,000 for both years …

This however doesn’t include any of the income paid to his personal services company, which according to his register of interests page, amounted to £78,000 a year for Davey’s work as an adviser to law firm and energy company between July 2017 and February 2022. That company, Energy Destinations Limited, filed for voluntary liquidation in June 2022 with £65,000 cash in the bank and total assets of £110,019. It also paid £20,000 in dividends in 2021, and £47,000 the year prior.

The dividends also appear to have been paid in a tax efficient way to his wife, E J Davey, who’s the sole director and secretary, and not to be confused with Sir E J Davey. Not that you’d know any of this from Davey’s “summary” today. Nonetheless, the LibDems told Guido “Transparency is really important and that is why Ed wanted to make his tax return public on our website”…

On July 14, Guido had a round-up of the freebies that MPs from all parties received, including Davey:

It’s festival season and our elected officials aren’t letting their parliamentary duties stop them from making the most of it. According to the latest register of interests, seven Labour MPs, including two Shadow Cabinet members, registered expenses-paid trips to Glastonbury – to the tune of £13,500 … Ed Davey also had a good month, in addition to getting two all-inclusive Glasto tickets worth £2,462, he also registered £36,500 in donations. Will that be made out to his personal services company?

At the Lib Dems’ conference that autumn, Davey thought he could be amusing by using the ‘c’ word against Conservatives. On September 26, Guido posted the offending video and this commentary:

Ed Davey has kicked off his conference speech with some kind of torturous stand-up routine. He tried warming up the crowd with an apology to the “clowning community“… and suggested he “used the wrong C word” when describing the Tories.

However, it seems that Guido missed this splash headline in the Mail on September 30 for an Andrew Pierce article, ‘How Lib Dem leader — and ex-Post Office minister — Ed Davey trousered £275,000 working for the legal firm that fought hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters accused of fraud’:

Will the Post Office Horizon scandal bring down Sir Ed Davey?

January 2024 must have hit Sir Ed Davey hard.

On January 7, The Times gave Alan Bates’s reaction to the dismissive letter he received from Davey in 2010, ‘How Ed Davey and ministers shrugged off warnings about Post Office scandal’:

In May 2010, hours after being appointed postal affairs minister, Ed Davey received a plea for help from Alan Bates. It was to be the first of many. Bates was a former sub-postmaster whose contract was terminated by the Post Office after he began asking too many questions about its flawed Horizon IT system …

He had been trying to raise concerns with the Labour government unsuccessfully until, in November 2009, he joined together with other victims to form the Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance (JFSA) to prove their innocence.

When the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition was formed six months later, Bates hoped it would herald a change of approach and wasted no time in seeking a meeting with Davey, the minister for employment relations, consumer and postal affairs.

But the Lib Dem minister’s 121-word response, stating that a meeting would not serve “any useful purpose”, was to Bates not just “disappointing” but “offensive”.

It is part of a cache of correspondence he has passed to The Sunday Times, much of which has never been published before and which reveals his deep frustration with ministers from three successive administrations between 2010 and 2019.

Crucially, it sheds new light on the five years of the coalition — the pivotal period in which the Post Office attempted to cover up the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history — during which Davey and his fellow Lib Dem ministers Sir Vince Cable and Jo Swinson ran the business department, responsible for the Post Office’s oversight.

Davey would have been well placed to help, both professionally and politically. Computer Weekly published its first report during the tail end of the Labour government under Gordon Brown:

When Davey was appointed in 2010, he appeared to have the requisite experience; he previously spent four years working for Omega Partners, a consultancy, where he specialised in the postal services sector …

There had also been a number of high-profile prosecutions of sub-postmasters. On May 11, 2009, the magazine Computer Weekly published the first major piece on the scandal, revealing the plight of seven sub-postmasters — Bates included — and raising concerns about Horizon.

Although Bates found Davey’s initial reply offensive, he did not give up:

Taken aback, Bates wrote again to Davey on July 8, 2010, noting that his response to the “very serious issues I had raised was not only disappointing but I actually found your comments offensive”. While there were “new politicians in post”, Bates said that Davey’s letter was “little different to the one” sent by Stephen Timms, the former Labour minister with responsibility for postal affairs, “seven years ago” …

Urging Davey not to simply listen to “your civil servants” and to accept without question the Post Office’s claims that “Horizon is wonderful, that there has never been a problem”, he added: “You can meet with us and hear the real truth behind Horizon.”

Davey did meet with Bates a few months later, and the former postmaster sent a follow-up letter:

In a follow-up letter sent on October 14, 2010, Bates sought to elaborate on a number of issues they had discussed, including how clauses in the employment contracts of sub-postmasters had been “employed to try to stop me and others raising concerns over Horizon”.

He also raised concerns that individual terminals operated by sub-postmasters could be accessed remotely and that this “may be the cause of these major unexplained losses that suddenly occur in sub offices”. The issue of remote access would prove pivotal to JFSA’s successful legal challenge against the Post Office several years later, but at the time when Bates was writing to Davey, it was fiercely denied by the Post Office.

Bates concluded that there was a “genuine willingness at this time to work with you and your department to help resolve these problems if you are prepared to do so”.

Seven days later, on October 21, 2010, Bates wrote for a fourth time to notify Davey of “yet another victim”. Seema Misra, whose prosecution is now considered one of the most egregious of the Horizon scandal, had that day been convicted by a jury after she was accused by the Post Office of false accounting and stealing more than £70,000 from her West Byfleet branch. Misra had pleaded guilty to false accounting — like several other sub-postmasters — but as Bates told Davey, she had done so only “because of the way Horizon and the contract are set up”. One month later, while pregnant with her second child, she was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Her sentence would not be quashed until 2021. Bates also raised the court cases of two other sub-postmasters.

However, Davey backed off:

When Davey replied that December, he again sought to distance himself from the controversy.

While confirming that officials were following up Bates’s concerns with the Post Office, in the case of Misra and the other two sub-postmasters, Davey said “as I made clear at the meeting” neither he nor the department could intervene in cases currently before the courts or where a legal judgment had been reached.

On Horizon, he added: “POL continues to express full confidence in the integrity and robustness of the Horizon system and also categorically states that there is no remote access … which would allow accounting records to be manipulated in any way.”

… In his fifth and final letter to Davey, dated August 20, 2011, Bates said: “Needless to say that having nailed your colours to POL’s mast, from the JFSA standpoint there was little point in continuing a dialogue with you or your department at that point.”

Bates notified him that JFSA members had taken the first step in bringing legal action against the Post Office and warned that the eventual financial liability — for the taxpayer, should the Post Office lose — “has the potential of being astronomical”. He ended by stating that Davey’s decision to “ignore our offer to work with you and your department” had left the group with “no option other than to seek redress through the courts, which is now where the real truth behind Horizon will be exposed”.

On January 8, a petition was posted online, ‘Demand Sir Ed Davey Return His Knighthood Over Post Office Horizon Scandal’, which reads in part:

At the end of 2015, he accepted a Knighthood for ‘political and public service’ which was announced in which was announced in 2016. Presumably, most of this was his work as a Minister for the Post Office.

We believe that it is only right that he returns his knighthood as a sign of accepting accountability for these gross injustices.

On January 9, Allison Pearson wrote a moving column about the scandal for The Telegraph and pointed out Davey’s constant moralising in Parliament in calling for various Conservative MPs to resign:

Davey was … hired as a political consultant by top law firm Herbert Smith Freehills, which was acting for – guess who? – the Post Office! He was paid £833 per hour, amassing a grand total of £225,000. There’s a phrase for that kind of money, I believe. Perhaps Sir Ed Davey might like to call for the resignation of Sir Ed Davey?)

That same day, the Mail‘s Richard Littlejohn pointed out that Davey’s dismissiveness in 2010 was misplaced:

By the time Bates, founder of Justice For Sub-Postmasters, contacted Davey in 2010, there had already been a number of high-profile prosecutions and some had been sent to jail.

Littlejohn reminded us of Davey’s hypocrisy:

Sir Ed Davey liked to pose as a champion of the little man speaking truth to power. In 2003, he publicly took up the cudgels on behalf of a whistle-blowing constituent who had been sacked by the NHS for exposing statistical manipulation at a health care trust in Surrey.

He condemned the NHS bureaucrats responsible as ‘Stalinist’ and called for a full inquiry.

Surely, there were parallels here. In both cases, one man was attempting to expose a systemic cover-up by an over-mighty public monopoly. Not only that, but the Post Office scandal was on a far greater scale, ensnaring not just one, but 100 — and maybe far more.

But now, with his feet firmly under a ministerial desk and his ample backside being chauffeured around in an official limo, Davey wasn’t interested. Instead of posturing as a white knight on a charger, righting wrongs of behalf of powerless victims, he slammed the door in Bates’s face.

Ultimately:

Davey not only continued to distance himself from the scandal, he maintained his support for the Post Office line. In short, after gaining ministerial office, he’d gone native. The PO isn’t a proper private company. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of the Government, which is the sole shareholder …

Davey’s job as an elected politician was to represent the interests of the public. Instead, he chose to act as an apologist for the out-of-control organisation he was paid to oversee. As Jo Hamilton, one of the main characters in the ITV drama, who was bankrupted and blackmailed into admitting false accounting, rightly says, Davey should have ‘done his job’.

Littlejohn condemned Davey’s excuses:

He was still at it yesterday. Rather than admit any culpability, he issued the usual weasel statement of ‘regret’ and blamed everything on his civil servants and the Post Office management, who had lied to him repeatedly on an industrial scale.

You don’t say. It was his responsibility to take Alan Bates seriously and subject the Post Office’s denials to rigorous, forensic investigation. He’s answerable to the British electorate, not the Post Office bureaucracy or the giant Japanese conglomerate Fujitsu, which supplied and operated the rogue Horizon computer system.

The persecuted sub-postmasters are precisely the kind of people the Lib Dems purport to represent, particularly in the far-flung rural constituencies the party frequently targets.

Davey isn’t the main villain of the piece here, though he isn’t the innocent bystander he pretends to be. Others abused their power and pursued prosecutions based on evidence they knew was false. Police are finally investigating cases involving perjury and perverting the course of justice. And not before time.

But he is pivotal. Had he taken Bates seriously, he could have stopped this scandal in its tracks and spared hundreds of innocent people years of debilitating heartache and hardship. He might even have saved some lives …

He was last seen posing in front of a van featuring a fatuous sign reading ‘Davey’s Tory Removal Service’ …

Davey certainly didn’t look like a man feeling even a scintilla of remorse over his role in the Horizon cover-up. And to be honest, he’d probably have got away scot free had it not been for ITV’s Mr Bates v The Post Office.

But, naturally, Davey doesn’t do shame. Someone else is always to blame. In recent years, he’s demanded the immediate resignations of public figures no fewer than 34 times — everyone from Boris Johnson to the head of Thames Water.

Then again, he is a complete and utter Lib Dem, a former Minister Without Responsibility. I don’t suppose he ever considered doing the decent thing and resigning over his failure to halt the spiteful, institutional persecution of hundreds of blameless sub-postmasters.

Why would he? Ever since, it’s been onwards and upwards …

If anyone deserves a knight- hood it’s the modest, heroic Alan Bates.

And if there’s anyone who serves ‘no useful purpose’ look no further than the Right Honourable Sir Edward Jonathan Davey FRSA, Member of Parliament for the Post Office and Fujitsu West.

This is the campaign poster to which Littlejohn referred:

Someone commenting on a Guido Fawkes post put this one up in reply:

One cannot say better than that.

More to follow on Ed Davey next week.