The Post Office we hanker after doesn’t exist anymore

The strange split vision of the British public never ceases to amaze me. Through one eye they see the Thatcherite world view: a realm in which privatised businesses are the best and the most efficient way of organising everything in the country from a devilled kidney to a kidney transplant; but through the other one they retain a misty-eyed perception of the good old Post Office as a great public service that mustn't be compromised in any way by the pursuit of filthy lucre.

I wonder where this prelapsarian Post Office can possibly be lurking? Has it perhaps left the sorting office of time, nipped round the back and dumped its letters to the future in a pond covered with duckweed?

The Post Office is at once the ultimate – and the only – public service

I only ask, because the sentimental conception of the Post Office owes more to the distant - and even fictitious - past than any contemporary reality.

It is one part Postman Pat mixed with another of WH Auden's The Night Train, while, with its evocation of a Britain dominated by collective probity and steely rectitude, it hearkens back to a still earlier age: the time before the First War when - so it was said - you could live your entire life in this country, your only contact with the government being the occasional purchase of a penny black.

So, the Post Office is at once the ultimate public service, and the only public service that exists - no wonder its fans are strung out along the political spectrum.

This week will see the publication of former telecom regulator Richard Hooper's report on the state of the national institution, and already the headlines are in the public domain. But is any of it much of a surprise?

The £7bn hole in the postal workers' pension fund was utterly predictable - a fraction of the estimated £1tr that the Government will have