This post strike will force me to throw in the etiquette towel

This week I received an invitation to Tatler's 300th anniversary party which had already taken place last week. The stamp was franked a fortnight ago.

In September I received an invoice which had been posted to me in July. It had taken two months to snail its way across London. Even the pigeon post would be quicker.

Given the 21st century has witnessed such astonishing technological advances, why is it that the Royal Mail has become even more retrograde?

Nicky Haslam's forthcoming memoirs, Redeeming Features, recall a vanished era when post was delivered twice a day - in the morning and afternoon. Now you are lucky to receive it at all.

I am sure I am not alone in changing my habits. This month I paid my credit card bill online for the first time - and I will continue to do so.

In recent days I have come to see the deteriorating postal service as the perfect pretext not to write thank-you letters.

I am counting on the fact that my would-be recipient will imagine my hypothetical letter has got held up or gone astray.

Is it acceptable to write thank-yous by email? I never used to think so but maybe the time has come to throw in the etiquette towel. The postal strike leaves us no choice.

It's not as if bread-and-butter thank-you letters hadn't already been downsized to postcards. Better to receive an email than no acknowledgement at all. (Or if you have a scanner, you could even send the letter as an email attachment).

The saddest thing is that we will all be the losers if the strike continues. The post will become evermore expensive and there will be even less of an incentive to write.

Nothing compares to the sensory excitement of receiving a letter: the handwriting, the ink, the paper and envelope, the stamps and postmarks, the stains and smells.

Emails and text messages are truncated, monochrome, and they don't whiff of anything. They also disappear into the ether, whereas letters are a biographer's best friend.

Or at least they once were. As Byron said, the letter is the only device for combining solitude with good company. Just don't count on getting one any time soon.

Has Ben got X appeal?

You can't accuse Ben Bradshaw of lacking populist credentials.

The Culture Secretary was at the Robbie Williams concert at the Roundhouse this week and in a Radio 4 interview yesterday he said (after a brief pause) he preferred The X Factor (ITV) to Strictly Come Dancing (BBC).

Does he really believe this or did he just see it as another opportunity to bash the BBC?

On Wednesday night he attended an election fund-raising dinner for Angela Eagle MP at the Arts Club where he was assiduously cultivating Labour supporters. David Miliband and Ed Balls had better watch out.

Both are often cited as Gordon Brown's putative successors but Bradshaw could have the X factor when it comes to sexing up the Labour Party.

Not since David Owen has Parliament been blessed with such a vain politician. And not since Disraeli have we had a PM called Ben.

Salman's way with the ladies

Salman Rushdie's love life has become an open book.

This week his estranged actress girlfriend Pia Glenn branded him "cowardly, dysfunctional and immature" for his decision to dump her via email and then accused him of harbouring lingering emotions for his ex-wife, Padma Lakshmi.

"He would talk about her night and day," Glenn said. "He would talk about her so much I would ask him to stop." You might have thought Glenn would be grateful Salman was talking about someone other than himself.

Just when we thought that was the end of the matter, Rushdie hit back in the New York Post describing his old paramour as "an unstable person who carries around a large, radioactive bucket of stress wherever she goes".

The exchange offers eloquent proof of Dr Johnson's dictum that friendship is in need of constant repair - and so too is Pia's love bucket.

Do not be fooled by my surname, Mr Griffin. It might be as English as warm beer but I think I am beyond the pale as far the BNP is concerned.

Because my father was born in Shimla and I was born in Singapore, I didn't get a full British passport until I was eight.

On paper, at least, I was thought of by British bureaucrats as a dodgy immigrant. OK, I am a dodgy immigrant. But where on earth do you propose to repatriate me?