It is the vicious war of words that threatens to stall Kemi Badenoch’s rise through the Conservative Party.
On Tuesday Henry Staunton, the former Post Office chairman who made a series of damaging claims about the government’s handling of the Horizon scandal in an interview in The Sunday Times in February, will delve deeper into his allegations at a select committee.
Staunton, 75, claimed he was told he was being removed from his post because “well, somebody’s got to take the rap”, and that civil servants said he should delay compensation payments to help Tory election chances.
Badenoch, the business secretary, hit back, saying Staunton was guilty of “spreading falsehoods”, that his interview was a “disgrace” and “a blatant attempt to seek revenge”, and that he had a “cavalier attitude to governance”. She also claimed Staunton was under investigation for bullying, which Staunton claimed he was unaware of in a detailed reply to the claims made in parliament.
“We didn’t see any real movement until after the Mr Bates [ITV] programme,” he wrote. “We will leave it to others to come to the conclusion as to why that was the case.”
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Badenoch, who is the favourite to become the next Conservative leader, may have met her match.
Staunton is a City veteran and a former chairman of WHSmith and BrightHouse, a rent-to-own electronics and domestic appliances chain. He was also the finance director of Granada Group, helping to direct the company to one of the largest mergers in media history, creating ITV.
Staunton, who was privately educated and went to the University of Exeter, began his career as an auditor at what was then Price Waterhouse, becoming a partner in the early 1980s. He joined Granada as finance director in 1992, becoming part of a trio of accountants who transformed the company’s fortunes with a series of daring acquisitions.
Profits rose from £57 million when he joined to £735 million six years later. He remained there until the mid-2000s, when he stepped back to a series of non-executive directorships at Legal & General, Ladbrokes, Ashtead Group and others. He joined WHSmith in 2010 and became chairman of the board three years later.
With the Post Office’s reputation in tatters, and its future financial position precarious, Staunton was approached “on bended knee” to effectively come out of retirement to lead the Post Office, a source said. “They needed someone who had his experience to get them out of a hole,” they added.
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In a statement put out in September 2022, Kwasi Kwarteng, the then business secretary, said: “Henry Staunton brings notable expertise and experience to the Post Office and I am extremely pleased he is taking up the position.”
Staunton felt the weight of the difficulties faced by the Post Office. “I was asked for first impressions,” he wrote in a note from a conversation with Sarah Munby, who was then the permanent secretary at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, in January 2023. “I said I had been on over a dozen public company boards and not seen one with so many challenges.”
Fast forward a year and Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama on the scandal, had sparked a wave of outrage among millions of viewers. Staunton was sacked three weeks later, and believes he was the fall guy for a decade of ministerial disregard.
Badenoch toured television studios, saying that she refused to “do HR in public” and asking that the media, after a change in personnel at the Post Office, “don’t hound the people or go after them”. Weeks later she took to the dispatch box to do just that, with a ferocious performance in which she took aim at Staunton, opposition MPs and the media in defence of her reputation.
Badenoch’s street-fighting response brought the worlds of the City and Westminster to a head and showed the political had become personal. But commentators warned that politicians should take care before accusing a seasoned businessman of “lies” on social media.
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Staunton, called “accomplished but prickly” by one ally who spoke to Sky News, continued to put out written statements with his position, although written evidence published by both sides — memos, letters and more — failed to substantiate either side.
On Tuesday Liam Byrne, the Labour chairman of the business select committee, will have his chance to get to the bottom of the battle — which some have lambasted as a distracting “sideshow” — when Staunton appears at the end of an evidence session lasting from 10am until after lunch.
