Privatisation is the only solution for Royal Mail

We have had a very high failure rate in deliveries of the catalogues for Emily Patrick’s exhibition,’ says an email from the painter’s husband. ‘Over 50 per cent have been lost in the post or inexplicably delayed.’ Come to think of it, my own most recent Amazon order, allegedly dispatched a fortnight ago, hasn’t reached Yorkshire yet — and neither has last week’s Spectator, although a large envelope posted to me from Old Queen Street on Wednesday did arrive on Thursday, but without its contents. Have aliens seized the sorting offices, or have Royal Mail managers been distracted by a ‘secret 62 per cent increase’ in their bonuses, revealed this week?

That percentage turns out to apply to middle managers at £2,717 apiece, hardly a sum to froth about. Royal Mail chief executive Moya Greene (poached from Canada Post) banked a £371,000 bonus last year, taking her package to a provocative £1.1 million; but that’s barely half the bundle collected by her predecessor, known to this column as ‘Teflon-coated Adam Crozier’, who moved on in 2010 to run ITV leaving a chorus of disgruntled mail users behind him. And the three executive posts below Greene averaged packages of £760,000 last year, compared to as much as £1.4 million in the Crozier era. So what I called ‘the delusion that turns astronomical numbers into “the rate for the job”’ last time I wrote about Royal Mail pay has been partially shaken off — perhaps setting an example for another state-controlled problem business, Royal Bank of Scotland, where five of chief executive Stephen Hester’s top team are in line for £6 million of share awards under a long-term incentive scheme, in addition to Hester’s own £780,000 pot.