Anders Hanson

Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of Liberator magazine, and I particularly enjoy Radical Bulletin. But when one of the stories that it covers is one that you have some knowledge of, it does annoy you if they get it wrong.

In the January 2008 edition it inevitably discusses the two recent leadership campaigns. Much of what it says is true, but I found one comment interesting:

Clegg’s second mailing reposed in a Sheffield sorting office to the annoyance of Inverness MP Danny Alexander, who arrived late to stiffen the campaign’s resolve and discovered no-one had asked whether the sacks could be dispatched from elsewhere.

The ‘non-delivery’ of the second Nick Clegg mailing has become a bit of an urban myth. I know countless people who received it, many within only two or three days of it being posted second class from Sheffield and one of those lived in rural Sussex. But if the mail sacks really were hanging around the Sheffield Mail Centre then I would love to know how they would be retrieved and ‘despatched from elsewhere’. I can see the phone conversation now:

Hello, I’m calling from the Liberal Democrats. You collected about 60 mail sacks from our office in Sheffield last week. Now I know that some people have already received the mailings that we sent out, but we think you might have forgotten some of the bags, so I wondered if I could come down and pick them up from you and post them elsewhere

(confused reply from the other end of the phone)

What did they look like? Well just like every other mail bag in your building.

(further reply from Royal Mail on the phone)

Oh, what did the mailing look like? Well it was a fairly anonymous C5 white envelope with a printed label on the front. Do you have anything like that in your premises?

(further incredulity from the other end of the phone)

You mean you have lots of envelopes that look like that, and that you don’t store bags from the Liberal Democrats in a specific place where they can be found again when we want to retrieve them at a later date?

(irate reply with the word ‘wasting our time’ mentioned frequently)

So even if I came down myself and personally searched all 13,000 square metres of the mail centre you don’t think that would be helpful

(phone is put down by Royal Mail with some force)

I think that probably clarifies the matter.

The real scandal was that three times Royal Mail managed to lose the booking that I had made for a van collection from our office (it’s a good job I kept checking with them that they knew about it). In the end it was collected on the day it was supposed to be, but that was after much hassle and asking of favours. It might have been easier if I could ring the local mail centre directly, as I could a year or two ago, but now you can only ring a central number which is only open on weekdays until about 6pm.