“I am being amicable.” Kemi Badenoch was before the Post Office Inquiry, explaining her language in a transcript of a phone call. As this was a call in which she was sacking the person on the other end, there turns out to be limits to her amicability, but perhaps Badenoch struggles with the concept. It may be that, in the words of Terry Pratchett, the closest she can get to the idea of a friend is an enemy who’s still alive.

Badenoch was Business Secretary when the public finally noticed the Post Office scandal and it suddenly became an important political issue. From the sound of her evidence, she’d taken little interest in the subject before then, content to let her more engaged junior minister handle things. By her own account, she’s a hands-off manager. Other accounts are available.

Much of Badenoch’s evidence was technical, and it will be months before we find out whether the lawyers learned anything. But the afternoon offered insights into the new leader of the opposition. In some areas, she is surprisingly frank. Asked about whether it was enough to simply get things right, she replied: “It’s important to be seen to be doing the right thing. Perception matters.”

Badenoch has the good fortune that everything she encounters confirms what she already thought. “We were allowing bureaucracy to get in the way,” she said, explaining why, although everyone in government had desperately wanted to pay compensation to the wronged postmasters, the government of which she had been a part had been so slow in actually paying them.

There have been suggestions that this was deliberate, that the Conservatives had been very happy to drag things out until Labour took over, and Rachel Reeves, rather than Jeremy Hunt, had to find the money. Post Office chair Henry Staunton, whom Badenoch was sacking in that amicable phone call, has claimed he was told by a civil servant to do exactly this. And it would hardly be the only area of public policy in which we get the sense that Rishi Sunak and his Cabinet were hiding behind the sofa and hoping that the bailiffs would go away.

Far from it, claimed Badenoch! She’d written a letter to Hunt, suggesting they get on with it. Could she have done more? We could perhaps compare Badenoch’s arms-length engagement with this issue with the way she waded into subjects that she cared about more. But she would hardly be the first Secretary of State to regard the Horizon scandal with slightly baffled uninterest.

This was Badenoch as Badenoch sees herself: concerned that things should be done properly, but not enslaved by the rules. Her answers began to resemble the ones people are advised to give in job interviews. It wouldn’t have been a surprise if she’d told us that her biggest weakness was that she just succeeds too much.

It had been a matter of great frustration to her that news of Staunton’s sacking had leaked before she’d spoken to him, she said. The inquiry counsel, less cynical than those of us listening, didn’t go into the question of whether the timing had been driven by Badenoch’s scheduled appearances on Sunday morning television the next day. Or indeed, who among the people in the Business Department that Saturday afternoon might have taken it upon themselves to call the press.

“I prefer to have the truth unvarnished,” she said, which will come as a surprise to the journalists she has berated for the sin of writing down the things she’s said.

“I’m more concerned in making sure that we get things done rather than making sure every single box is ticked,” she said, and who could argue with that? Although, if you stop and think about it for a minute, it will be a surprise if the inquiry concludes that the Post Office scandal, with its many lies and deceptions, lasting years on end, came about because everyone involved was just too focused on following the rules.