Asinine, inept rubbish from the Royal Mail – or Royal Cock-up

The other day I read that people in what is laughingly misnamed public service get about 43% more in pay and pensions than ordinary people like you and me.


Our reward for subsidising them is that they plan to make more of our lives a bloody misery than they are already by carefully planned strikes.

This would be insult enough if they weren’t so utterly incompetent, as witness the evidence on this page. Just read the right hand bit. The items are only tracked after they have been delivered.

I guess the equivalent is, not “The doctor will see you now” but “The doctor will only see you after you have died.”

The Royal Mail was “run” for a while by an ex-adman called Crozier. Clearly his experience in the land of “This shit is marvellous just because we say so” left a lasting impression.

Crozier has great career agility. He skips like a mountain goat from one overpaid job to another, leaving just before the sheriff. For the past 16 months he has been working his magic at ITV. Their revenues have just plunged by 20%.

Could he be a future prime minister? After all, he is a Scot.

Which brings me to a mystery that has been puzzling me for a while now.

Why does Scotland send us so many great men in so many fields but such utter shit when it comes to politics?

Think of it. From Adam Smith to Livingstone to Alexander Fleming or – rather different – Paisley, Busby and Ferguson. And goodness knows how many more. All excellent.

But in politics? Ramsay Macdonald, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown. And worryingly, Cameron is a Scots name.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

2 Comments

  1. Looks like the Scottish are quite clever. Ship out the crap before they do damage over there.

  2. As a Scot still living and working in Scotland I would like to believe that Rezbi is correct but unfortunately it's more likely that politics, unlike science and even football management, both results based, lacks intellectual rigour with its proponents believing they can achieve the miracles they tell us we want and can deliver in the limited timespan they think is within our attention span. If they can't it matters not as we will have forgotten by that time anyway!

    Or, maybe, they are just bullshitters and believe they can fool all of the people all of the time. And, maybe, they are right!

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