Royal Mail’s Slow Fade Is a Global Postcard From the End of Empire

Royal Mail’s Slow-Motion Collapse Is a Love Letter to the End of Empire
By our man in the departure lounge, still waiting for a parcel posted in 2021

LONDON—On a drizzly Tuesday that could pass for any Tuesday since 1973, Royal Mail announced another “strategic pivot,” which is C-suite argot for “we’re quietly circling the drain.” International observers—those who have witnessed the privatization of Japan Post, the IPO of Brazil’s Correios, and the brisk efficiency of Switzerland’s yellow post buses—watched the scene with the same detached pity you reserve for a former head prefect who now sells artisanal marmalade out of a van.

Royal Mail’s latest plan involves slashing letter deliveries to every-other-day and pivoting (there’s that word again) toward parcels, in theory because Britons now order so many electric foot-spas from Shenzhen that the vans can’t keep up. In practice, it is an admission that the universal service obligation—once the pride of a nation that painted half the globe pink—has become a quaint liability, like owning a corgi with asthma.

The irony, of course, is delicious enough to spread on the aforementioned marmalade. Royal Mail was literally the first postal service available to commoners; now that the commons are broke and the weather’s worse, the service is reverting to a luxury timetable. If you want daily delivery, move to Estonia, where the state carrier will bring you prescriptions, ballots, and a cheery text when your parcel is nine minutes away. Or try Rwanda, where drones drop blood bags to rural clinics faster than a London courier drops a passive-aggressive “sorry we missed you” card.

Global capital has noticed. International funds that once bought Royal Mail shares as a stable dividend play—sort of a gilt-edged utility with extra bunting—have spent the last decade watching the stock oscillate like a Tory party donor’s moral compass. In the past year alone, the Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský upped his stake to 30 %, presumably because nothing says “safe haven” like a postal service that burns cash faster than incense at a state funeral. Meanwhile, trade unions threaten strikes the way Britain threatens summer: inevitably and without sun cream.

The wider significance is postal, political, and faintly metaphysical. Across the world, the postal service is the last sinew binding citizens to an idea of the nation-state. When the mail stops arriving daily, so does the tacit promise that somewhere, someone is keeping the ledger of civic life. In India, the 150-year-old dak system is experimenting with parcel lockers inside metro stations. In the U.S., the USPS is legally obliged to reach every mailbox from Key West to Point Barrow—though Congress funds it with the same enthusiasm it reserves for gun control. Only in Britain does the conversation revolve around whether the Queen’s head on a stamp still counts as marketing gold or just nostalgic taxidermy.

Brexit, naturally, hovers over proceedings like a poorly franked specter. Leaving the EU’s customs union turned Royal Mail’s international arm into a sort of bureaucratic escape room: packages now ricochet between Heathrow’s World Cargo Centre and a shed in Langley, accruing handling fees like barnacles. Italian olive-wood chopping boards that once arrived in time for Sunday lunch now appear sometime after your divorce is finalized. The tabloids blame Brussels, but the real culprit is simpler: when you replace frictionless trade with friction-full sovereignty, even the envelopes start to resent you.

So, what next? The smart money says Royal Mail will be broken up, its lucrative European parcel network sold to a private equity firm named after a Greek god who never held a proper job. The rump letters business will stagger on, perhaps as a government-owned “service of last resort,” delivering nothing but court summonses and A-level results until the last red pillar box is repurposed as an NFT. Tourists will pose beside it for selfies, captioned: “Remember when we used to send things?”

And somewhere in the queue at Mount Pleasant sorting office, a pensioner will still be waiting for a birthday card that was posted in March. She’ll clutch a tracking number that reads, with impeccable British understatement: “Delayed—awaiting overseas customs clearance.” The customs in question, of course, is the passage of time itself.