Was there some failure of communication, do you think, when the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky bought Royal Mail (with the full support of government and opposition) last year? I only ask because it seems to have been taken aback by the full extent of its obligations – to deliver mail to every part of the UK and in the case of a first-class stamp, to do so, with some exceptions, by the next day.

If you increase the cost of a service sixfold and reduce the level of service, it shouldn’t be a complete surprise if the number of people using it goes down

This week we see the price of a second-class stamp go up 4p to 91p and first-class stamps increase by 10p to £1.80. I am the twit who was looking elsewhere when this was announced, and so didn’t do the obvious thing and buy a couple of books of stamps in advance. So now, like everyone else, I shall have to think hard before splurging on a first class stamp – which has more than doubled in price in the past six years, and has increased by 137 per cent through eight separate rises. Second-class stamps have gone up six times. Meanwhile, a lucky 77 per cent of customers actually get the next day delivery they paid for, something Kretinsky was a little coy about when he appeared before Liam Byrne’s Select Committee last week.

With second-class mail, the company manages to get away with a third-class service by changing its terms of operation, whereby second-class mail gets to its destination on alternate days and never on Saturdays. Ta dah! By lowering the standards (it’s being done on a pilot basis in a number of areas) you may just manage to meet them. Thank you for that, Dame Melanie Dawes, chair of Ofcom (just how do you reckon someone gets a damehood by presiding over the collapse in a public service?). The other way you get away with it is by billing a reduction in service as a ‘reform’, since EP Group owned by Mr K has repeated its call to ‘urgently move forward’ with reforms to the service. Neat, huh?

God knows, I am no business guru, but one elementary aspect of the thing strikes me about the Royal Mail justification for its eye-watering price increases. Richard Travers, managing director of letters at Royal Mail, said: ‘We always consider price changes very carefully, balancing affordability with the rising cost of delivering mail. On average, UK adults now spend just £6.50 each year on stamps and there are 70 per cent fewer letters sent than 20 years ago. In the meantime, the number of addresses we deliver to has increased by four million to 32 million addresses across the UK.’

Right. He is blaming the increase on the fact that people are sending fewer letters. Mr Travers, how do I say this? Twenty years ago, the price of a first-class stamp was 30p, and 60p in 2012; it’s not entirely surprising that people send fewer of them now that the price is £1.80. If you increase the cost of a service sixfold and reduce the level of service, it shouldn’t be a complete surprise if the number of people using it goes down. You’re welcome.

The Communications Workers Union has yet to reach an agreement with management about introducing the new, debased universal service. If they would like to send me a note of their next picket outside the EP Group HQ, I’ll do my best to come along.

Obviously, given the number of other means of communication available, there was always going to be a decrease in postal mail use, but there was always a cohort who liked sending birthday and Christmas cards, thank you letters and – in my case – even postcards. That number will diminish further now that stamps have added to the cost of living conundrum.

Mr K’s response to Liam Byrne’s questioning about his rubbish service (postmen delivering post in batches, for instance) at the Select Committee was to say that in Italy postage was more expensive and the service even worse. To which Mr Byrne said acidly that he wasn’t interested in Italy; and did he not know what the obligations of the company were when he bought it? You know, I don’t think we ever got a satisfactory reply.

Meanwhile, we are left to ponder Mr Travers’s exhortation: ‘To protect the service for the future we need to urgently move forward with implementing universal service reform to support a more modern, more reliable and more sustainable service for our customers.’ Increased prices, lower services equal reform? Come again?<//>