As fans of Postman Pat know well, usurping a regular postie and delivering letters to people’s homes is trickier than it looks.
This was a lesson learned repeatedly during series two of the children’s animated television show – especially episodes 26 and 27, where first Pat’s wife Sara tried to do his round for him, and then the rabid capitalists of Greendale attempted to modernise the workplace and send out a robot instead. Spoiler alert: Pat returned to work in episode 28.
Anyway, it is also a lesson now learned by upstart operators who supposedly fancied cherry-picking Royal Mail’s more lucrative markets by delivering mail to our doors. Last week, Royal Mail’s only real rival in this market, the ridiculously named Whistl, effectively abandoned plans to deliver to doorsteps after it couldn’t find anybody to fund its service.
The announcement was terrible news for 2,000 or so Whistl employees now facing the axe but, conversely, rather welcome for Royal Mail workers worried about their jobs, and for the firm’s owners, with the shares shooting up by 3.9%.
It was also nicely timed for the postal service’s annual meeting this week, although it all comes too late for Pat: he was dropped from Royal Mail marketing campaigns in 2000, as he no longer fitted its “corporate image”.
Extra-curricular activities
If you are the type who employs a City broker, and have sometimes wondered exactly how hard they’re grafting on your behalf for those chunky fees, here’s a fun game to play.
Give them a call to see if they’re in the office this week. Repeat the exercise on 5 June, any time between 16 and 20 June, then again for a couple of weeks from the end of June. The chances are you might keep missing your broker, who will be extremely busy having meetings with other clients, none of whom could make it into the City.
In case you’re curious, those meetings will probably be taking place this week at the Chelsea Flower Show, the Lord’s Test match and (possibly) Wentworth, where the PGA golf is teeing off. Your broker will then be dragged over to Epsom for the Investec Oaks on 5 June, followed by Royal Ascot (16-20 June) and Wimbledon (29 June-12 July) – which should have ensured that everybody is in peak bubbly-quaffing form to return to St John’s Wood for more crucial negotiations, which will need to take place during the Ashes Test in the middle of July.
Life is grand, isn’t it?
Frozen in
In the peerless 1983 comedy film Trading Places, Eddie Murphy’s character, loudmouthed down-and-out Billy Ray Valentine, is banged up in a police cell after being accused of attempted robbery. An officer suddenly arrives and tells him: “Move it: you made bail,” to which a startled Valentine replies: “I did?”
This seems like the polar opposite to the situation of Navinder Singh Sarao, the British trader fighting extradition to the US after being arrested last month for allegedly spoofing financial markets and supposedly contributing to the 2010 “flash crash”. Unlike Valentine, he seems to be incredibly rich and discreet, having allegedly made £27m but still being the sort who waits for a supermarket to mark down its sandwiches before buying lunch.
So you can imagine that when Singh was told he hadn’t made bail, he might have responded: “I didn’t?” – seeing as he thought he had £5m in a trading account for that purpose. But it transpired that those monies, along with all the rest of Sarao’s funds, have been frozen by the US authorities, making it an offence to touch them. Lawyers explained this to the magistrate, to no avail, meaning Sarao’s been in custody for almost four weeks. He goes to the high court this week to get the conditions altered.
