MAIL COMMENT: Royal Mail puts the customer last

There has to be something seriously wrong with a business when 85 per cent of its customers think it has got no better over the past two years, while 43 per cent believe its services have got worse.

Indeed, shareholders in any private company with a record like that would be demanding boardroom changes and a radical rescue plan to improve customer satisfaction.

But when that company is a state-owned semi-monopoly like Royal Mail, the normal rules of business don’t apply.

On the contrary, it seems the entire management philosophy of the men behind Britain’s postal services can be summed up as putting the customer last.

Far from seeking to improve services in the face of growing private-sector competition, one could be forgiven for thinking Royal Mail has set out deliberately to make them worse.

It has closed 4,600 post offices, with 2,500 more to go. It has increased stamp prices by more than a third, while slashing deliveries so that millions of customers have to wait for the post until the afternoon – causing huge difficulties for small businesses.

Meanwhile, it manages to lose some 15million letters and packages a year.

Yet incredibly, this seems to pass for good management in the topsy-turvy world of state industry – so much so that Chief Executive Adam Crozier waltzed off with a £2million bonus last year.

Until he starts satisfying his customers, is there any reason why he should ever have another?

Feminism gone mad

Most will be utterly baffled by the Government’s proposed changes to the laws on manslaughter and murder.

First there’s the extraordinary new defence of ‘killing in response to words and conduct which caused the defendant to have a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged’.

What’s all that about? Are gangsters really to be allowed to escape a murder charge if they kill people who insult them?

Then there are the deeply confusing rules on provocation in cases involving the killing of a member of one sex by the other.

On one hand, a husband who kills an unfaithful wife in a fit of jealousy will no longer be allowed to plead he was provoked.

On the other, a wife who kills her husband because he has subjected her to a ‘slow burn’ of abuse may be charged only with manslaughter.

Attempting to explain the rules, Minister for Women Harriet Harman says a wife’s infidelity can never be an excuse for killing her. ‘It’s unacceptable if you’ve lost a sister, or a mother, to then be told it’s her fault because she provoked him’.

Why, then, does she think it acceptable for those who have lost a brother or a father to be told it was his fault because he taunted his wife?

Can it be safe to let this deranged feminist loose on the law of the land?

Keegan’s shame

Released from Strangeways after less than half his six-month sentence for a vicious assault, serial thug Joey Barton walks straight back to his £71,000-a-week Premiership job at Newcastle United.

He should be offered yet another chance, says manager Kevin Keegan.

Why? In a career of violence, Barton has punched a teenager so savagely that his victim lost several teeth, he has thrust a lit cigar into one teammate’s eye, bitten the ear of another and left a third unconscious and covered in blood.

Many believed professional football – that world of vanity, greed, corruption and institutionalised gang-rape – could sink no lower as a role model for boys.

Keegan has proved them wrong.