The other week I discovered the corpse of a plump brown rat outside my back door. I fetched a shovel, put it into a black binliner and continued with my day’s business. What I did not do was fold my arms and refuse to move for the day. Clearly I would not fit very well into the working culture at the Royal Mail’s sorting office in Leyton, where a dead rat found in the men’s lavatories there last week provided the inspiration for one of an increasing number of wildcat strikes afflicting the postal service.

Having lost a ballot of their members for a national strike on pay and conditions back in September, postal unions seem determined to manufacture one by stealth. On Tuesday postal services in London and the South East were paralysed when 20,000 staff walked out.

Why do we put up with the Royal Mail and its delayed letters? The postal service is increasingly looking like an anachronism from the 1970s, the Britain of Red Robbo. But still old ladies leave out boxes of chocolates for their postman each Christmas. Among them, for all I know, may be Baroness Thatcher, who rejected the idea of privatising the Royal Mail in the belief that it would be an insult to the Crown.

The Royal Mail does not receive a fraction of the spleen vented upon privatised rail companies. Yet compared with the Royal Mail, the national rail system works like a Swiss watch. A fortnight ago, the postal service in my village in Cambridgeshire was suspended without explanation for three days. Moan as they might, no passenger is recorded as having spent quite so long stranded on a Virgin train.

It helps the Royal Mail that few of its customers get to see the insides of the organisation, which is a massive job-creation scheme. I have been inside the Mount Pleasant sorting office in Central London. There, in the middle of the sorting floor, was an impressive automated letter-sorting machine, a hundred or so feet long, standing idle while the office’s 4,000 employees sat hunched over desks sorting items of mail by hand and flinging them several yards into little wire trolleys. Another machine had been switched off, having spewed Mrs McGrumbie’s postcard from Paignton on to the floor and abandoned it there. Even the business of sorting out first-class letters from second-class letters, surely the easiest of operations to automate, was being carried out by hand.

When I asked the Royal Mail why the sorting could not be automated properly, as it is in many other countries, I was given the explanation that there would not be room at Mount Pleasant. It would be a strange machine that occupied a greater floor area than the thousands of workers required to do the same job.

Maybe the Royal Mail has devised the most efficient way of collecting, sorting and delivering post. The trouble is that nobody is allowed to try to devise a better one. It is currently legal in Britain to run a business making hardcore porn or selling loans at 1,500 per cent interest to the poor, yet illegal to run a postal service unless you charge at least £1 per item or deal only with packages weighing more than 100g.

The good news is that we will not have to rely on Royal Mail for much longer. On April 1, 2007, the postal regulator Postcomm is planning to end the Royal Mail’s monopoly for good and allow anybody to apply for a licence to compete. From then on, your morning post may well be delivered by Hays, the mail order people, or by TNT. Let us just hope that their licences do not get lost in the post.

The author gave evidence on the liberalisation of the postal service to the House of Lords EU Select Committee