The Last Post.

When I was a boy you could trust the Royal Mail. When I was a boy the Post Office was something to be spoken about with hushed tones of affectionate reverence. Quite how they both managed to turn to rot with such resounding synchronicity is one of the more laughable mysteries of our time, but then I suppose there was also a time when Rolf Harris commanded the respect of millions and U2 made roughly digestible music. Times change is all I’m saying, and surely time is up for the boys in red that cower on the other side of the letterbox, dropping parcels in the rain and scrawling incoherencies on little red forget-me-nots. I bet they thought we’d all forget, but it looks like their luck has run out.

When I was a boy, I thought the Post Office was basically the only bank on the block. I had a soft, grey, serious-about-saving Post Office account book and after every birthday and Christmas my Mum or Dad would walk me down to the local branch and I would deposit my slightly hard-earned prize money for being such a good little soldier. The nice Post Office lady (it was always a lady; in the early 80’s most men were busy being made redundant, growing mullets or involving themselves in bloody hooliganism, often all three at once) would peer down at me as I slid my book and cash across the counter and would then update my account and give the relevant page a nice Post Office stamp to make me feel all grown up. Over the years you grew familiar with the smell of your local post office and way back then people took them seriously, like the church; which is why there is something very sad about the fact that both those institutions are now up on bricks, a state of affairs almost entirely of their own making.

And when I was a boy, you put faith in the Royal Mail and the Royal Mail rewarded you for that faith. You never doubted, for even a second, that sooner or later the postie would come knocking and that knocking came with goodies. Whether it was with some sort of utter Kellogg’s crap that you saved hundreds of tokens for, or Grandma’s card with 50p sellotaped inside, there was always some manner of little treat coming from somewhere. Of course, you had to wait a while because for various reasons the postal service wasn’t quite as quick back then, though that doesn’t explain that while all their competitors have upped their game to speed up their service in the last twenty years the Royal Mail are still achingly slow and fuddly. It’s not even that Evri and Yodel and FedEx and UPS are all that great either, it’s just that they always seem to do the job better than the outfit that should still be the market leaders. With all their strike action and their failure to complete even the slightest of delivery based endeavours with the minimum of competence the Royal Mail is a tired old joke and if they deserve any sort of continuation of their Royal patronage it might be most appropriate to have it come from Prince Andrew.

Last year was a howler for the Royal Mail and it is something of a miracle (if miracle is the right word) that they’re still standing. In purely business terms they have money haemorrhaging out of every orifice as they lean, exhausted, against the garden fence, waiting with grim resignation for the big bastard of a bulldog that saw them coming a mile off to circle round one last time before making the killer move. And if there is a killer move then it is likely to be the blowout from all this Post Office mess that is slowly unfurling before our eyes like a heavy, stuffed, used nappy blossoming all evil under an angry sun. And it beggars belief to think that that nappy has been bubbling away for well over a decade, unapologetic for the lives it has ruined and staunchly, arrogantly refusing to acknowledge there was even anything wrong in the first place, until it became clear that no amount of cover up would ever mask the almighty honk they had managed to brew up.

 As I write this the inquest into the scale of the Post Office scandal ploughs on. All the corners have been cut and all the escape routes blocked. The question is not whether the Post Office, a state run organisation let’s not forget, did anything wrong but exactly how wrong they did it and on just how vast a scale they conducted it. We hear of pregnant mothers being jailed for stealing money they didn’t steal and of families cracked wide open under the strain of postmasters being accused of crimes they knew nothing about, all based on evidence provided by a computer system that didn’t work. And it’s no real surprise that no-one really knows who to blame in all of this: Starmer, Mr Fujitsu & Mr Horizon, Ed Davey, Tony Blair, David Cameron, or the former Anglican priest (so it surely can’t be her fault, because she’s Christian) Paula Vennells,- the list goes on – but it seems fairly clear that pretty much every name that gets hauled up has some hand, little or small, in letting the stink get worse and worse. This was a cover up of the very worst kind and the choice of some to compare the Post Office to the mafia in their actions does not in any way seem to be an exaggeration. It looks like they’re going to have to pay for this one, and if the payments required to compensate all those falsely accused were in any way just and fair then the whole set up would have to shut down tomorrow, on the grounds of financial and moral bankruptcy as well as gross incompetency.

We spend an awful lot of time being told by politicians the importance of truth and justice and the rule of law. True life dramas like this Horizon scandal never seem to happen on anyone’s watch. Sure, everyone has a few skeletons in their closet but for the Post Office it’s like opening the wardrobe to find it contains a string of mass graves on the Eastern Front in 1943. Paula Vennells, who now resembles an exhausted ferret, may think that handing back her CBE is justice enough, but she really should be hung out to dry, ideally next to the corpse of that thick, nasty, dead-eyed little turd of an investigator, Stephen Bradshaw, who left skid marks all over the inquiry on Thursday. Financial compensation simply isn’t enough. Heads should roll on a revolutionary scale. Buckets of heads, severed clean, eyes rolled upwards, the crowd baying their approval. Not that it will happen because once that starts who knows where the buck might stop and then what for the Tories chances at the next election?

If it was Amazon or Microsoft or even Greggs then it somehow wouldn’t matter as much, but this is a self-policing (you literally can’t make this stuff up) branch of a government run institution which was once a trusted part of the fabric of society and that meant something to millions across the country. I’d love to wrap the Post Office and the Royal Mail up today and send them to the front gate of hell but that would put a lot of people out of job for doing nothing wrong other than working to earn a living. I’d love to be able to get by in life without stamps and recorded deliveries and rolls of bubble wrap, but since that can’t happen whenever I use the services of the Post Office from now on there will be a sour taste in my mouth and a rude word at the tip of my tongue reserved for the cretins that run the whole sorry show. I used to think of the Post Office as an organisation like a little old lady sitting on a park bench, smelling of lavender, handing out shiny coins to cheeky children and feeding the pigeons with a smile and now I just think of the Post Office as a complete cunt, which is a shame.

G B Burton. 14.01.2024