Is this the worst week yet for the Lib Dems?

Party leader Ed Davey has been attacked for failing to tackle the Post Office Horizon IT project scandal during his tenure as minister for postal affairs, writes Andrew Grice. But how culpable is he?

Ed Davey was minister for postal affairs between 2010 and early 2012 (PA)

This week the Liberal Democrats have enjoyed an amount of media coverage a minority party can only dream of. Unfortunately, 99 per cent of the headlines were negative: they were about their leader Ed Davey’s failure as minister for postal affairs during the 2010-15 coalition to tackle the Post Office Horizon IT project scandal.

The Lib Dems were on safer ground in joining the SNP (who have supplanted them as the “third party” in the Commons) and Greens calling for parliament to be recalled this weekend to vote on the UK’s airstrikes on targets linked to Houthi rebel bases in Yemen, with the aim of protecting commercial ships in the Red Sea.

Although Davey regrets not asking more questions about the disgraceful treatment of thousands of innocent branch owner-managers, he is only one of 19 postal affairs ministers since Horizon was introduced in 2000. Four were Lib Dem MPs, seven Labour and eight Conservative (though two were there for five minutes during the turmoil of the Johnson and Truss regimes). It’s crystal clear that until recent years, ministers were told a pack of lies about Horizon by the Post Office.