The curse of ‘deadmin’

George Monbiot has gone to war. Some readers may know this fellow by his nickname ‘Moonbat’ – he’s a Guardian columnist, environmental campaigner and sometime bugbear of my colleagues on this magazine. But I think his casus belli, here, crosses the ideological battle-lines. 

He is in a righteous rage because, a full four months after the death of his mother, Vodafone was refusing to cancel her mobile phone contract. He says they were rude and aggressive, insisted on speaking directly to his ‘frail, confused’ elderly father (despite his children having a power of attorney), asking him to recite his dead wife’s phone number and tell them exactly when the contract started, and using his failure to recall as an excuse not to cancel the contract. When finally the family stopped the direct debits, he says, Vodafone set a debt-collection agency on the elderly widower.

His experience clearly resonated with a number of his readers, judging by the responses he got detailing similar cruelties; many saying that they were told that only the deceased person was authorised to cancel their own account.