What’s wrong with public sector? Bosses are handed season tickets to Honours List including disgraced Post Office chiefs
UNLIKE everyone else in the country, I have not yet seen Mr Bates vs The Post Office, because I’ve been too busy trying to get into the mind of the baby Jesus enthusiast and former postman-woman in chief, Paula Vennells.
This is the person who was in charge during the sub-postmaster scandal and who this week handed back the CBE she’d been awarded for . . . ?
Actually I’m not sure what it was for. Services to men in shorts?
Educated at a private school in Manchester, Mrs Vennells went on to study Russian and French at Bradford University.
Which is not exactly Oxford or Cambridge. But she did well enough to work for L’Oreal, Dixons and Argos and various other private sector businesses.
But then one day, she decided the private sector was not for her and that she’d take a job running the Post Office? And I can’t help wondering. Why?
The Post Office is such a miserable thing these days because the postman doesn’t deliver good news any more.
There are no birthday cards or Premium Bond wins. It’s all bills and speeding fines.
And thanks to email, it’s not just miserable but dying on its ar*e.
So who in their right mind would say, “Yes. I want to run a company which will pass the time till it expires in ten years by pushing bad news through the nation’s letterbox every morning”?
Answer. Someone who wants a CBE.
That’s why nothing run by the government works any more. The roads are full of potholes because the man or woman in charge is busy having their weekly chinwag with King Charles.
And if you try to complain, you get a recorded message saying that complaining is a hate crime and you’ll be prosecuted.
Meanwhile a hundred thousand immigrants are pouring up the beaches of Kent because the boss of whatever department is supposed to be stopping them is hosting a cheese and wine evening with friends to celebrate his new OBE.
And if you are wondering why the burglar who nicked your car last week hasn’t been found, it’s because your local chief constable is at the lodge, showing off his latest jewel-encrusted gong.
I use a couple of window cleaners called Dave and Dave. They come round every few months and are cheery, loyal and extremely diligent.
And neither of them will ever get a mention in the New Year’s Honours list.
Neither will my butcher. Or the man who does an excellent job keeping the rats and mice at bay.
Whereas the people who run the Post Office and all the other quasi-government-run institutions such as health trusts and libraries and museums have weekly season tickets to Buckingham Palace.
Now this might be fair enough if these civil servants were working in the public sector for some pocket money and a handful of luncheon vouchers.
It’d be right that their financial sacrifice was rewarded with some kind of empire-based recognition.
But they are not working for a small amount of money.
Ms Vennells was paid more than £4.5million over her seven years as chief executive, including bonuses and pension totalling nearly £3million.
It’s the flawed squad
ACCORDING to the statistics, the Welsh seaside resort of Aberystwyth is among the top ten most dangerous small towns in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
There’s a smorgasbord of violent crime, drugs, theft, burglary and shoplifting – so you’d imagine the police are pretty busy.
Well yes, but they’re not so busy that they don’t have the time and resources to investigate a note that’s been left outside someone’s house, inviting them to go back to Birmingham.
This, according to Plod, is a hate crime.
So if you’ve been beaten up or burgled, I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait until the scoundrel who wrote this vile message is found, prosecuted and jailed for life.
Got to grin ‘n bear it
STEPHEN FRY has thrown his weight behind a campaign to get soldiers in the King’s Guard to change their bearskin hats to something more animal friendly.
Really? We want the King being guarded by people in hats made from nylon?
The fact is that indigenous tribes in the remote top end of Canada kill the bears and eat the meat.
So what should they do with the fur that’s left over?
Throw it away? Or sell it to the British Army and make a few quid?
WHEN the door fell off an Alaska Airlines plane this week, an iPhone was sucked out of the yawning chasm and fell 16,000ft back to Earth.
Where it was found in perfect working order. Which begs a question.
What sort of case did it have, because I want one.
PC ads need a woke-up call
AS we know, the most diverse and woke place on Earth is to be found in the commercial breaks on television.
You have a black father and his white wife with their Chinese and Indian children going to the supermarket in their electric car to buy vegan snacks from a transgender checkout person.
But according to a Channel 4 study, there is still room for improvement.
They say that in a recent Specsavers advert, the man who climbed several flights of stairs to deliver a package to the top floor of the wrong block of flats was out of order because the man in question was black.
And that the woman in an ad for Fairy Liquid shouldn’t have been white.
It’s hard to keep up frankly. And that’s before we get to the case of singer FKA Twigs, who actively wanted to appear semi-naked in a poster campaign for Calvin Klein.
But the ad has now been banned here because the increasingly mad Advertising Standards Authority has decided it was likely to cause offence.
Which it did. To a grand total of TWO people.
Not a rot to fear
WE are told that Morrisons is developing a range of robots which will monitor stores in a bid to stop shoplifting.
I’m not sure, however, that this will be terribly successful, partly because the robots are solar powered.
So they won’t work when they are indoors.
Mostly though, they won’t work because we are not talking about Terminator robots here.
They have no karate moves and are not armed with 8,000-rounds-a-minute miniguns.
They’re basically miniature wheelie bins and I fear that as a result, shoplifters will simply knock them over.
Rust in peace in jams
FIGURES from TomTom show that London is now the slowest city in the world.
On average, it takes 37 minutes and 20 seconds to cover just 10km.
Most people threw their hands in the air and said the 20mph speed limit is to blame. Others said it was Sadiq Khan’s love of the bicycle lane.
But me? I just rolled my eyes because anyone who says London moves slowly has never been to Kampala in Uganda.
Over there, the average commuter spends 2.5 hours a DAY in a traffic jam.
And this is nothing compared to Dhaka in Bangladesh. Set off for work in your car over there and it will have rusted away 20 years before you arrive.