Conservative Ministers just showed again that they will sweep everything under the carpet.

Is this a surprise to you? Not for me as the last 14 years being in the government nothing has changed: Austerity, Brexit, Partygate, Cronyism, the Truss debacle and the individual failings of ministers who behave as if the rules don’t apply to them and going on and on.

Kemi Badenoch v the Post Office become a great political soap opera just to distracts nation from reality. The business secretary fired Henry Staunton, the former chair of the Post Office, in January 2024. A month later, Staunton told the Sunday Times that Sarah Munby, a senior civil servant, instructed him to slow compensation payments to victims of the Horizon scandal.

Kimi Badenoch has not stopped there, she launched an extraordinary character assassination from the dispatch box in the House of Commons instead, claiming Staunton had been fired after accusations of bullying (her originally explanation to the public was, that Staunton left by “mutual consent”). If this would be true, I assume PM would confirm as he was asked 7 times, but Rishi as Rishi – he refused to repeat Badenoch’s claims.

All of this is ultimately a perfect distraction from Staunton’s real revelations: the Post Office is rotten at its core and the government is unwilling to do much about it. The Horizon compensation schemes, whether by design or good old-fashioned incompetence, seem likely to frustrate victims’ claims. The “overturned convictions” scheme, which is supposed to provide compensation to those who were wrongly convicted, didn’t open until three years after the court of appeal exposed the “most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history”. Most victims are yet to receive a penny. Payouts from the other programmes are as low as £15.75.

The schemes themselves are Kafkaesque. The forms are almost impossible to understand without a specialist lawyer. Until recently, the Post Office refused to fund such assistance. Victims are told they must keep the details of their claim secret.

However, there’s no law that stops victims telling their friends, family, or advisers about settlement claims (or, crucially, comparing notes with each other).

Staunton was right to say a “toxic culture” still persists at the Post Office. The origins of the Horizon scandal lie in a years-long, institution-wide deception, the details of which are now infamous. Rather than admit its flagship IT project didn’t work, the Post Office foisted the blame on innocent post office operators, ruining hundreds of lives.

The Post Office’s cooperation with the inquiry has been equal to zilch, zero, nil, nada. They even failed to disclose on time or completely more than 400,000 documents, and caused repeated delays.

Nick Read, the Post Office’s CEO, told the business and trade select committee he was “delivering great things for the Post Office”, but victims reported the opposite. Last year Read and other senior staff were paid bonuses for cooperating with the inquiry (Reid agreed to return his bonus after news of it became public).

In January this year he wrote to the secretary of state for justice, saying that the Post Office would be “bound to oppose” overturning convictions of 369 out of the 900 victims of the scandal.

This sounds like Staunton’s description of an institution that continues to insist on the guilt of the victims. Before the select committee, Read changed his tune, claiming that only “one or two” of the 900 are guilty.

Yes, we are going same way as all other inquiries. I wonder whether I will live enough long to see closure of any recent and previous enquiries, or I will die before, as quite a few victims of Post Office scandal already passed away.