Ed Davey was interviewed on the Today programme  this morning about his actions as postal affairs minister during the Horizon scandal.

The BBC had obtained a briefing from civil servants to Ed in which he was advised to meet Alan Bates “for presentational reasons” and not to make any commitments to him.

Ed made the point that he had wanted to meet Alan Bates anyway after Bates’ second letter to him and, after that meeting, he had questioned the Post Office, who had lied to him. He added that it wasn’t until the BBC interviewed a whistleblower from Fujitsu in August 2015, long after he had left his post, that there was any hard evidence to go on about the problems with Horizon.

He also talked about how he had been calling for an independent enquiry and speedy compensation since 2015.

From the BBC:

However, Sir Ed told the BBC’s Today programme it “wasn’t the case” that he had agreed to meet Mr Bates because of potential bad publicity.

“That’s what the officials put in the submission to me just before the meeting, but I wanted to meet him because after his second letter, I felt I should hear his concerns,” he said.

Sir Ed said he was the first minister to meet Mr Bates and added he took his concerns “very seriously”. “When I put those concerns to the Post Office, concerns about the Horizon IT system, I’m afraid I was lied to,” he said. With a general election coming up, Sir Ed said he had not considered stepping down as Liberal Democrat leader.

“When I go out there campaigning, we’re finding incredible results in seats that only we can beat the Conservatives in,” he said. “The party is very keen for us to fight this election really hard under my leadership.”

Those of you who haven’t read Ed’s Guardian article from last week in which he recognised and apologised for his failure to see through the lies he had been told can do so here.

In the article, Ed said:

We can now see how the Post Office tricked and bullied men and women into giving false confessions. So many served prison time, lost their businesses and their homes, for something they didn’t do. They’ve spent years waiting for justice, and some have died waiting. It is a black stain on our nation, on our government and most of all on the Post Office.

So how did we get here? It’s hard not to conclude that this was a conspiracy on a grand scale, and it was only exposed when a brave whistleblower came forward from inside Fujitsu itself in 2015. But thanks to that whistleblower, the high court could finally rule in 2019 that the Post Office had lied when saying there was no remote access to a subpostmaster’s local Horizon system, and lied about how robust the Horizon system was. I and other ministers from all three parties may have had concerns, may have spoken to brave people like Bates and James Arbuthnot, but without a whistleblower we never had the proof from inside to tear down the Post Office’s wall of lies.

We have a broken system. A system that puts major institutions like the Post Office at arm’s length from our elected representatives, and makes them almost a law unto themselves. Close enough for rubber stamping, yet out of reach of proper scrutiny.

It may shock you that, even though the Post Office is owned by the government, there aren’t any MPs or ministers on its board. Instead, a single civil servant sits on the board. Lord Forsyth, a lifelong Conservative, was right last month to argue that the problem is a system in which ministers who are theoretically accountable for arm’s-length bodies “are unable to execute responsibility”.