Sir Ed Davey should hand his knighthood back over the Post Office Horizon scandal says Kingston councillor Yvonne Tracey who has started a petition to remove the Surbiton MP and Lib Dem leader’s gong. It has already gained more than 19,000 signatures.

The former deputy postmistress at New Malden Post Office, who represents Green Lane and St James Ward as an independent residents’ councillor, is also vowing to stand against him at the general election.

“I never thought I’d stand for Parliament – but I could not stand back and let our current MP and former Postal Minister Ed Davey stand again unchallenged after how he treated former sub-postmasters, in what the public now know to be the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.

“In Tolworth, sub-postmaster Sathyan Shiju lost his home, his business and attempted suicide on more than one occasion.

“We need an MP who will never ignore their constituents, who will always stand up for the people – not the powerful.”

Sir Ed, who was postal affairs minister between May 2010 and February 2012 has been criticised for initially refusing to meet Alan Bates, founder of the Justice for Sub-Postmasters Alliance, saying he did not believe it “would serve any purpose”.

He did later meet Mr Bates in October 2010 – and the Lib Dems say he was the first postal affairs minister to hold such a meeting since campaigners began pressing for talks in 2003. He says he was deeply misled by Post Office executives.

The Kingston and Surbiton MP since 2017, and before that from 1997 to 2015, told ITV News reporter Paul Brand that he was lied to on an industrial scale and his heart went out to the “hundreds who were hit”.

“The postmasters deserve a huge amount; they deserve compensation, they deserve a huge apology from the Post Office, from Fujitsu [which had developed the faulty Horizon software] and from all the people who led this conspiracy of lies against them and frankly the whole British public,” said Sir Ed who became Lib Dem leader in 2020.

More than 900 Post Office branch managers were prosecuted when faulty software made it look as though money had gone missing from their accounts. That software, named Horizon, had been developed by technology firm Fujitsu.

Today (Tuesday, Jan 16) Paul Patterson, the European boss at Fujitsu, has told the Commons Business and Trade Committee that the firm has a “moral obligation” to contribute to a redress scheme for Post Office victims.

He apologised saying he was “truly sorry” for the company’s role in “this appalling miscarriage of justice” admitting there were bugs and errors in the system and that the company did help the Post Office in their prosecutions.