Politics latest:Post Office investigator ‘one of worst in history’; wrongly jailed victim didn’t let her children visit

The questioning techniques deployed by Post Office investigators are “robust”, an emeritus professor of government at the University of Manchester has said.

Speaking to Sky News, Colin Talbot said the Post Office and Royal Mail have for years had their own crimes committee, and they were very similar to rank and file police officers.

“The way in which they carry out investigations is governed by the same sorts of rules as rank and file police officers,” he said.

Asked if the description of Post Officer investigators behaving like “mafia gangsters” was fair, Mr Talbot said he suspected some of the questioning techniques they use were “pretty robust”.

He said: “They’re not supervised in the same way the police are, because it’s an internal function to the Royal Mail and the Post Office. 

“Certainly when I dealt with them many years ago, their methods were pretty robust.”

Mr Talbot said there had been seven prime ministers and 20 post office ministers as this crisis gradually unfolded “who failed to get a grip of this”. 

“It seems to me that’s certainly one of the places where the blame ought to be put for what’s gone wrong,” he added.

Asked if Sir Ed Davey, who was postal affairs minister between 2010 and 2012, should have done more, Mr Talbot said: “Yes, but I think it applies to virtually all the ministers involved.”

He added there has been “plenty of warnings that there were problems about it and ministers should have picked it up”.

“I certainly think there’s no excuse since 2019 for ministers not to have realised when the High Court ruled that there was something wrong with the Horizon system, that there was a serious miscarriage of justice here,” he said.

“They ought to have done something about it a lot earlier than now.”