Rogue mail

Putting The Spectator together in a week of postal difficulties is always an awkward task because we can never be quite sure when our subscribers are going to get to read the magazine. We can’t be certain that by the time it drops on to your doormat in Woking the government will not have fallen and Mr Blair be living in exile on St Helena. You may even have been dead for several years, or at least have run off with the milkman. What you probably won’t have done, on the other hand, is run off with the postman. To judge by the tirade of complaints in the letters pages of national newspapers this week — assuming that they refer to the current postal difficulties and have not been mouldering in the back of some Post Office van since the 1970s — postmen are not very popular at the moment.