I quite warmed to old Staunton but was he the full shilling?
HENRY Staunton, 75, denied acting ‘erratically’ as chairman of that stricken leviathan the Post Office. His behaviour during the business select committee was, mind you, a little odd.
He arrived with a bulging briefcase whose sheafed papers he proceeded to empty on to the witness table and arrange in superneat piles. Some of these had multiple highlighting, in pink and green. We newspaper columnists learn to become wary of gents who use green ink.
The committee was waiting but Mr Staunton appeared unaware of this, so keen was he to get his papers tidy. Job done, he jumped into his chair and beamed wonkily over some smudged half-moon spectacles. Under questioning, he whipped out a cheap ballpoint pen and made rapid notes on yet more scraps of paper.
He did not always look down while making these notes, so the writing may have been a terrible mess. It is not impossible that his home is a forest of towering, dusty documents. He had opened his evidence by disclosing that he had only just found a crucial memo that had been missing for weeks. This was all too believable. But was he telling the truth about paying compensation too fast? Sacked as Post Office chairman by the trade secretary Kemi Badenoch, he recently retaliated by claiming he was given ‘a nod and a wink’ by a civil servant not to be too fast paying compensation to victims of the Post Office-Horizon scandal. Mrs Badenoch says he is lying but there has been enough of a stink for Labour to hope it can damage Kemi’s chances of becoming Tory leader.
So what were we to make of this Mr Staunton? Well, his hearing was not great. Did he simply mishear what ministers and mandarins and, most bloodily, his chief executive, Nick Read, were saying to him. ‘Now then, Henry, about his compensation.’ ‘Eh? Condensation, d’ye say?’
I quite warmed to old Staunton but was he the full shilling? His hands shook. He tilted his chair so much, he could easily have tumbled out of it. The head wobbled and he pulled faces when trying to listen to the MPs. There were moments when he repeated little phrases. ‘I’m not an erratic, er, er, I’m not an erratic individual,’ he mumbled, clutching one side of his jaw and sucking his gums, two eyes darting.
‘I’m a stickler,’ he said foggily, yet from his evidence it was obvious he was a broadbrush man with a negotiable approach to detail. The unconventional, Corinthian spirit can be a good thing on company boards but if you are snaggled in a stinker of a political ding-dong, it is handier to be more sharply on-the-button than this.
MRRead had just done his own turn at the committee. He came across as a drawling corporate johnnie. He must have said some 50 times that he was ‘very clear’ or ‘very, very clear’. A nervous lawyer called Ben Tidswell who sat on the Post Office board said Mr Staunton was ‘erratic’. Mr Tidswell did not strike one as a liar or, for that matter, as an overstater of the case.
Witnesses were obliged, by the committee’s show-boating chairman Liam Byrne (Lab, Hodge Hill), to give evidence on oath. That opens the possibility of perjury if they fibbed. Mr Read was asked if he had ever threatened to resign. Of course not, he replied. Yet Mr Staunton claimed Mr Read four times ‘said he was going to chuck it in’. Unless that hearing let him down, one of them must have been spouting an untruth.
The committee’s Labour MPs relished Mr Staunton’s evidence because it could make life jumpy for Mrs Badenoch. The Tory MPs tried to discredit him because they wanted to protect Kemi. And Ian Lavery (Lab, Wansbeck) gave Mr Read grief for being a fat-cat. Mr Lavery himself was once leader of the diminished National Union of Mineworkers. He left it with a payment of £165,000. Ah, lovely politics.