Retired postmistress who wants to boot out Sir Ed
A FORMER postmistress who will take on Ed Davey at the General Election wants to oust the Lib Dem leader as ‘ justice for sub-postmasters’.
Yvonne Tracey, a 68-year-old grandmother and councillor, held no ambitions to become a parliamentarian before becoming incensed by the scandal and Sir Ed’s role as a former postal affairs minister.
The politician last week refused to apologise for not taking enough action when asked ten times by ITV last week.
Mrs Tracey will stand as an independent in Sir Ed’s south-west London constituency of Kingston and Surbiton after becoming angered at how he dismissed concerns from campaigner Alan Bates about the faulty Horizon accounting software
‘I’d put a fiver on me’
while in the coalition government between 2010 and 2012.
Sir Ed recently said he was ‘deeply misled’ and given assurances that there were no issues with the software, which saw more than 700 sub-postmasters prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft, fraud and false accounting, after faults with Horizon made it appear that money had gone missing from their branches.
But he has repeatedly refused to apologise for his handling of the matter.
The issue has captured public outrage following the ITV drama series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, and prompted Mrs Tracey to channel her renewed anger into standing for Parliament.
She told the Mail: ‘ That programme made me really angry, as I think it did the whole country.
‘I don’t want to be in Parliament really, but I believe in justice, so I said I would stand purely to help keep this issue in the public eye. Ed Davey isn’t the only person with questions to answer on this, but he is my local MP and so it’s him that I will be going up against.’
Sir Ed enjoys a majority of more than 10,000, and defeated Mrs Tracey’s grandson, independent candidate James Giles, at the 2019 election.
Mrs Tracey said the Lib Dem leader ‘should be worried’ about the weight of public anger at those involved in the Horizon scandal – and the Government’s response.
Mrs Tracey spent a quarter of a century running a Post Office in nearby New Malden, where she has lived all her life.
Unlike more than 1,000 of her colleagues, she was never pulled into the Horizon affair. But she knows others who were, and her feelings run deep. She said: ‘He’s not done himself any favours by not saying sorry since. I’m not a betting person, but if I was, and there was an election tomorrow, I’d put a fiver on (being elected over Sir Ed).’
Mr Giles, 23, who is helping his grandmother with her election campaign, said the main point of her standing was to keep the Horizon scandal in the public eye.
He said: ‘I think she will get a good deal of support in the constituency – she’s had hundreds of messages backing her and people saying they want to go out leafleting for her since she announced she was standing at the weekend.
‘For Yvonne, it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t get a single vote, it’s just about keeping the issue alive going into the election, to keep pressure on Sir Ed and other MPs. I think she is going to make a huge dent in his majority, but ultimately she is all about fighting injustice.’
Mr Giles recalled a time his grandmother intervened in a fight between teenagers on the street as an example of her intolerance of unfairness. He said: ‘One of these days, she will get herself into trouble, but she just wants to always stand up for what’s right in the world.’
The Lib Dems have accused Mrs Tracey of Islamophobia over a previous election leaflet. Hina Bokhari, a London Assembly Member for the Lib Dems, said: ‘London does not need more hate.’ Mrs Tracey described the allegations as ‘false and malicious’, with the police investigation being dropped.
Few Conservative MPs are more loathed by Labour than Lee Anderson: as a defector from their party, and a former coal miner at that, his interventions are always unwelcome.
except for last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, when he drew the House’s attention to the embarrassed absence from the Chamber of Sir ed Davey, and declared that the Leader of the Liberal Democrats should be ‘clearing his desk, clearing his diary and clear off’.
This was a reference to Davey’s inglorious role, as a Minister for Postal Affairs in the Coalition government, with regard to the unjustly jailed sub-postmasters.
Their avenging angel, Alan Bates, had accused Davey of having ‘enabled them [the Post Office management] to carry on with impunity, regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict’.
Quentin Letts observed in his Parliamentary sketch: ‘As Mr Anderson resumed his seat there was an unprecedented reaction from the Labour benches: cheers.’
while Conservatives and Labour Party activists are seen as each other’s greatest enemy, they are actually united in their deepest contempt — for the Lib Dems.
This was eloquently expressed a few years ago by the then Tory MP Stewart Jackson: ‘It’s pretty much the one bond which still links the Conservative grassroots with the Corbyn Labour Party — a visceral loathing of their local Lib Dem opponents, for many years acknowledged as the dirtiest street fighters in politics, belying their saintly and sanctimonious and always self-reverential image.’
Malfeasance
It’s not just that Davey went on to be paid almost £300,000 as a consultant to the law firm used by the Post Office to defend the civil claims brought made by wronged sub-postmasters — though Davey says he was unaware of the link — that causes him to be singled out (both Labour and Conservative ministers had also caused Mr Bates despair).
There is also the contrast between Davey’s seemingly unquestioning acceptance of the Post Office’s denials of any corporate malfeasance and the Lib Dems’ claim to be the home of the freethinking individualist against the complacency of the two ‘big parties’.
Yet we should not be so surprised, as the Liberal Democrats are the masters of malfeasance themselves, despite their perpetual air of self-righteousness.
As good an example as any was their refusal to hand back £2.4 million of stolen money to the victims of a fraudster called Michael Brown.
The party took this vast sum ahead of the 2005 general election from one of his companies — Brown was not registered to vote and didn’t live in this country. The Lib Dems failed to make any checks on this dodgy fellow, so didn’t know that he was a villain.
But what is truly shocking is they wouldn’t hand back the funds to those defrauded by Brown, after he had been convicted, on the grounds that they had spent it all on electioneering.
when it comes to electioneering, there is no party so unscrupulous as the pious Lib Dems. Although they would doubtless see it as just dedication to the cause.
So it was only the Liberal Democrats who illegally continued with door-to-door delivery of campaign leaflets during the ‘stay-at-home’ guidelines at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was only the Lib Dems who broke their pledge to suspend national campaigning after the death of the Duke of edinburgh.
As to the content of such leaflets, here the Lib Dems make the other parties seem almost like innocents. Their favourite trick is to produce documents which purport to be local newspapers eulogising their candidates, but are in fact merely Lib Dem propaganda sheets.
Despite demands to desist by the electoral Commission, the Society of editors and the News Media Association (NMA), the Lib Dems have continued with this form of fraudulent misrepresentation.
It has been used by, among others, activists working for their Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Layla Moran.
They pushed through letterboxes in her Oxfordshire constituency something called the ‘Oxford west & Abingdon Observer’, with a front-page banner headline, ‘Layla Moran sets the pace’, and underneath, ‘Lib Dem Layla has dealt with more than 20,000 items of casework in just two and half years’.
Cynical
As the NMA declared on behalf of real — and furious — local newspapers: ‘These publications are designed to fool you into thinking you are reading independent journalism. In fact, they are the exact opposite — party political propaganda sheets masquerading as real newspapers.
‘It has been reported that some of the leaflets are not clearly marked as being produced by the Lib Dems. we think this cynical attempt to mislead you undermines trust in both politicians and independent local newspapers.’
Both the Society of editors and the NMA have written to Sir ed Davey to complain about this practice, but appear to have got no joy.
The Society of editors laments: ‘ It seems that no matter how many times this issue is raised, the Lib Dems continue to pretend there is not a problem here.’ But now, Davey has a more immediate concern to deal with in his own constituency of Kingston and Surbiton.
At the weekend, 68-year- old Yvonne Tracey, who for 25 years was a deputy postmistress in the constituency, declared she would stand locally against Davey in the forthcoming general election — and on the precise issue of his involvement in the Post Office scandal.
There is a faint echo here of an extraordinary (and farcical) electoral challenge 45 years ago. This was when my old colleague, Auberon ‘Bron’ waugh, stood in the 1979 election for the North Devon constituency, then represented by the former Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe.
Bron had registered as a candidate for the Dog Lovers’ Party — in memory of Rinka, the Great Dane bitch of Thorpe’s erstwhile lover, Norman Scott.
Rinka had been shot dead by an incompetent hitman hired by a group of Thorpe’s benefactors within the Liberal Party, with Scott the intended target — to silence, permanently, the threat that he would reveal his homosexual relationship with the then party leader.
Scandals
Thorpe had been acquitted of all charges after what Bron referred to as ‘an extraordinary summing up by Mr Justice Cantley at the Old Bailey’ — which is why he was able to stand in the 1979 election. Thorpe did lose his seat, then; although this was not because of the intervention of the Dog Lovers’ Party. It got only 79 votes.
Later Lib Dem scandals can’t quite match up to a conspiracy to murder charge. But still, Thorpe’s successor, David Steel, resigned from the House of Lords in 2020 after being condemned by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse for recommending that his colleague, the paedophile Cyril Smith, should have a knighthood.
This was despite Steel’s admission to the inquiry that he had long ‘assumed’ Smith was guilty of abusing children, after the former Rochdale MP had made some sort of private confession to him.
And the only former Cabinet Minister to have been imprisoned for perverting the course of justice happens to have been a Lib Dem: Chris Huhne, in 2013.
Oh, and then there was David Laws, who was compelled to resign as Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury in the same Coalition government, after he was revealed to have improperly claimed over £50,000 in expenses — rent paid to his partner, which was strictly against the rules.
You will not be surprised to know that in the 2010 election, Laws had put out leaflets claiming that he was ‘whiter than white’ on expenses.
Yes, it’s that mixture of piety and reckless conceit that makes the Lib Dems so hated by both Labour and Conservative. It is the political version of how pedestrians and motorists are united only in their detestation of cyclists.
The Lib Dems are like the worst sort of cyclists: so sure of their own superior morality, they can’t quite believe it when they are called out.