It is a peculiarly British ritual, the posting of a letter. The crisp white envelope, the careful lick of the stamp, the satisfying thud as it falls into the red pillar box. For centuries, that act has been a quiet contract between citizen and state: trust us, and your words will arrive. But that trust is fraying, worn thin by a statistic that feels almost unpatriotic. Only three-quarters of first-class letters are now delivered on time. What does that mean, exactly? It means that one in four letters is late, a phantom missive wandering the postal void, its message delayed, its sender betrayed.
Let us pause on that fraction: 75 per cent. In any other business, that would be a crisis. In a school, a fail. In a bakery, a scandal of stale loaves. But for Royal Mail, an institution as old as the British state itself, it is a new normal, a quiet admission that the horse has bolted and the cart is in a ditch. The official target is 93 per cent, by the way. We are not even close.
The human cost is not in spreadsheets but in missed birthdays, lost job applications, forgotten hospital appointments. I spoke to a woman in Bristol whose birthday card from her grandmother arrived six days late, the envelope crumpled, the message inside apologising for the delay before it had even happened. That is the texture of this failure: a small betrayal repeated thousands of times a day, a national service becoming a national frustration.
What has happened? The narrative of decline is familiar: internet competition, rising costs, strikes over pensions and pay, a pandemic that accelerated the death of the weekly letter. But there is a deeper cultural shift at work. We are losing the habit of waiting. We expect instantaneity, a world where everything arrives within a click. The letter, by its nature, demands patience. But patience, too, is a social good that is eroding. And Royal Mail, lumbering under an obligation to deliver to every address, six days a week, is a monument to a slower age that we still want but no longer fund.
The result is a classic British compromise: a service that is neither fully privatised nor fully cherished, a relic that we refuse to bury. The postal workers I know are decent, overburdened people doing their best with vans that break and sorting offices that flood. The managers talk of “operational challenges” and “transformation plans”. But the street-level reality is simpler: you post a letter, you hold your breath.
This is not merely a logistical problem. It is a symptom of a broader fraying of the social fabric. When a public service fails, it corrodes trust in the unseen infrastructure that holds us together. The letter is a metonym for connection. And if the letter cannot be trusted, what can?
There is a possible path forward: an acknowledgement that the universal postal service is a subsidy for national cohesion, a willingness to pay for it in either money or tolerance. But we are a nation that prefers the fiction of cheap stamps and the reality of a quarter of them going astray. We want the red box but not the cost of filling it.
So here we are, caught between nostalgia and modernity, clutching our delayed letters like tiny accusations. The Royal Mail was once the envy of the world. Now it is a mirror, and what we see is a people who have forgotten how to wait, and a system that cannot keep up. The last post? Not quite. But the clock is ticking, and the letters are falling through the cracks.
