Kemi Badenoch appears at the Post Office Inquiry

The Post Office Inquiry has gone on so long that Kemi Badenoch, a junior minister when it started, is now leader of the opposition. Along the way she spent 15 months as business secretary, at a time when the Post Office was trying – and often failing – to ensure victims of the scandal received adequate compensation.

So Badenoch’s appearance at the inquiry this week took on something of a star turn. Badenoch was at pains to stress that she had done all she could to accelerate the compensation process. Her department had considered saving money on the cost of lawyers and she had written to the chancellor (albeit six months into her post) asking if he might hurry things up a bit. 

But Badenoch had reckoned without the Whitehall machine, as she put it, and the session gradually turned from evidence-gathering to a polemic on civil service inertia.

‘There is an absence of common sense in a lot of Whitehall because people are afraid to trust themselves and trust their judgement, follow principles and do the right thing. People want legal cover,’ she told the inquiry lawyers, who were struggling to keep her on topic.

Asked whether the rule of law stood in the way of what ministers wanted to do, Badenoch retorted that the burden lay in regulation, not law. ‘You can have the rule of law without an excessive burden of regulation. But if you keep adding more and more rules, that will slow things down,’ she said. ‘We should be able to look at that without assuming that this is a criticism of the entire system of the rule of law.’

And while this was all delivered with the air of someone looking beyond the parameters of the inquiry, Badenoch was prepared to show a little introspection too. The ‘government machine and the system is broken, and I think you will find that I am actually in a minority of opinion when I say that… as you can see, given that I’m leader of the opposition, not prime minister and not secretary of state, that is not an argument that I am winning.’