Postie take your partner for Strictly Mandy

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/p ... 356004.ece

Ann Treneman: Parliamentary Sketch

Lord Mandelson slid into the upper chamber as if executing a particularly beautiful gliding swoop in a waltz. We know that he wants to be on Strictly . . . and it is obvious that he has been practising his glissades. As he arrived, peers stopped what they were doing (yes, even snoring). Heads were raised. Eyes opened. Gossip interrupted. They love a star in the Lords.

Actually Mandy doesn’t need Strictly. He’s already got his own show, a spin-off (sorry) called Strictly Come Mandy. Yesterday I watched to see how it works. Mandy leads and almost everyone in the Lords follows, pinkies crooked, heads held high, eyes shining as they watch him dance circles around them.

Mandy had come to announce the partial privatising of the Royal Mail, though he didn’t like that phrase. “I prefer the words ‘strategic partnership’,” he purred. For many in the Labour Party, whatever you call it, it’s an outrage. Over in the Commons, Mandy’s mouthpiece, “Postman” Pat McFadden, was getting a pasting from furious MPs. In the Lords, Mandy was in total control.

He has a talent for making the complicated sound very simple. We are all in the grip of an e-revolution (he says the “e” very long as in “eeee-mails”). We are sending five million fewer letters than two years ago. This was the problem. He dismissed the idea that other postal companies posed a threat. “Making these companies go away is not the answer,” he pronounced.

Lords were actually nodding at him now (and no, it was not the pre-nap nod, but the “I’m with you, Mandy” nod). He explained what was wrong with Royal Mail. Basically, and I paraphrase, it’s in the dark ages, with unions run by a bunch of dinosaurs.

“In modern European postal companies,” he noted (I love the “modern”, it’s such a Mandy touch), “85 per cent of mail is put in walk-order by the machine for delivery. In Britain, it is still done entirely by hand.” He made it sound almost evil. The only cure can be found in the “strategic partnership”.

The love-in was interrupted by a cry of pain from the Labour side. Mandy slowly moved his suspiciously mahoganised head round to view his attacker through gold-edged spectacles. “I am bound to declare my interest as a former postman,” announced Lord Clarke of Hampstead to the murmur of “hear, hear”. The Lords love nothing more than the idea of a humble worker.

“Today the final nail has been driven into the coffin of a once great public service, the Post Office,” lamented Lord Clarke. Mandy blinked, as if in slow motion. Lord Clarke burbled on, at first refusing to refer to Mandy as “his noble friend”.

The peers looked concerned for tradition is all in the Upper House. Mandy slid up to respond. “I note what my uh, uh, uh, uh,” he said, pausing for some time, “friend, actually my old friend, says.” It was a totally disarming device. Mandy smiled the smile of a crocodile who had swallowed his prey silently.

Another peer jumped up to praise the humble postie. “I don’t think I really can recollect ever having met one who wasn’t cheerful, helpful and enterprising,” he said, almost glowing as he recalled his meetings with the worker bees of the world. But Mandy wasn’t having that and noted that, actually, what postmen need in addition to tributes are skills, investment, automation and regulation. It was all rather, well, strict. But then, Mandy is the man who put the strict in Strictly.