Ed Davey did his first interveiw of the year on Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday this morning. The first question, was, of course, on the Post Office scandal and Ed’s role as Minister.
Her first question : Why did it take you so long to say sorry?
I probably should have said sooner early on.
It’s a huge scandal and our hearts go out to postmasters. They need to get exonerations and compensation quickly and we need to get the truth from the enquiry.
He talked about two sub postmasters in his constituency, one of whom spent 16 months in prison.
I’m going to fight for those and join others in making sure that the Government gives the sub postmasters the fair deal they deserve.
He actually has been fighting for them since there was evidence that there were flaws with Horizon and called for the enquiry back in 2015.
Kuenssberg showed him the letter he wrote to Alan Bates in 2010 saying that there would be no point to a meeting. Ed replied that he had only been in office for 11 days and was advised by his officials not to. When Bates wrote to him again, though, he wanted to know more about his concerns and was the first post office minister on record to meet him.
When that meeting took place in late 2010, he said he was concerned about the issues Alan Bates raised about Horizon. He took the concerns to his officials and the Post Office and was given categorical assurances that there was no remote access.
He said that it turns out that the Post Office were lying to him and that conspiracy of lies means that we need systemic change in how we deal with things like this.
Kuenssberg asked him if he’d never stopped to think that there must be something going on here.
He said that he wasn’t asked about it in Parliament. He said that things didn’t really change until the BBC’s Panorama programme found hard evidence in the form of a whistleblower from Fujitsu in August 2015.
Kuenssberg then moved on to the General Election, asking if we weren’t embarrassed by the results in the by-elections last week.
Ed responded:
What we are seeing in this Parliament is huge success for Liberal Democrats. In those 4 by-elections we had staggering success in true blue areas.
We’ve had some of our best local elections ever and we have had by far the best success in local government by-elections.
We go into the next election with a real sense of excitement. There’s loads of areas where if you want to get rid of your Conservative MP, you’ve got to vote for the Liberal Democrats. I’ve talked about the “Blue Wall” where we are having massive success against the Conservatives and the south west as well, we are coming back there. So we go into this election year more confident than for many a year.
Kuenssberg asked if he was confident that we can be the third party again. His answer was simple. “Yes.”
Earlier she brought up the Guardian letter signed by 30 prominent party members back in November as we reported here.