The sub-postmaster paid little attention to the quiet Scotsman buying a book of stamps in North London a few weeks ago. He should have been more attentive: that was the last time that Pat McFadden used his local post office and, if he has his way, it could be the last time he will ever use it. In the next two weeks the Employment Relations Minister’s massive programme of post office closures moves in on London.

Mr McFadden has been given one of the worst jobs in government: wiping out post offices. Few institutions are prized more highly by traditionalists than the local purveyor of Giro checks, brown envelopes and gossip about her down the road; a noble British tradition that dates back to Henry VIII, via Anthony Trollope and W.H. Auden. His own postbag bulges with heartfelt appeals on behalf of the village post office: one in five will close this year. The strength of feeling is not really about stamps but more about community, fear of change and respect for the old.

Now Mr McFadden has to take the fight to a new battleground: the city. Amid the gnashing of dentures and rending of Barbours that has accompanied the departure of the rural post office, this part of the government deal has been overlooked. The Post Office is due to earmark 150-200 of the capital’s post offices for the chop, among 2,500 nationwide. Surprisingly, the urban kind is just as inviable as its country cousin. “No one comes into politics to do something that can be very unpopular locally to the people affected, and I am very aware of that,” he said. “But sometimes governments have to take difficult decisions and make difficult changes. This is one of those occasions.”

But this is more than just about how handy it is to dispatch your eBay parcel; it is about how much stomach the Government has to fight sentiment with reason, or to be cruel to be kind. There is a persuasive case to be made for saying goodbye to the Post Office as we know it, ill suited as it is for modern living, and so ill used, but is the modest Mr McFadden able to do it? In a huge, sparse Whitehall office, the so-unassuming-he-is-almost-invisible Mr McFadden sighed.

“All sorts of change is coming in the way that people live their lives and I think public service, and to a degree the Post Office is a public service, has to respond to that, and a challenge for government is to provide its services in a way that keeps up with the change that people have in their lives.”

Post offices are a casualty of the internet. With hundreds of them attracting only 16 customers a week on average, each visit to those is being subsidised to the tune of £17.

“Customer numbers have gone down about four million per week compared to a couple of years ago and the losses are rising. The network was losing £2 million a week a couple of years ago. It is now losing about £3.5 million a week.”

The Government’s very own Postman Pat (“I think that is a very inventive phrase,” he chided us. “I cannot imagine how long it took you to think of it.”) said that they had to cut numbers or else pour in more and more public money, “year after year to a network that was losing more and more money with declining custom”.

It is a failing business model. After these closures the Government is still going to pump in a £150 million annual subsidy to a network in which only 4,000 of the remaining 12,000 branches will be commercially viable. Why continue the subsidy? At this he lost his nerve. “We do accept that the Post Office is not a purely commercial network, that there is a social need for a wide coverage of branches,” he said.

We wondered whether local communities could not club together to run their post office themselves. They can, he said, but it has to cover the full costs to Post Office Limited, an average total of £18,000 a year. Plus, any local takeover would have to guarantee to run it for several years, he said. Groups of well-meaning villagers tend to balk a little when they hear that.

Mr McFadden looks like one of the most worried men in Westminster: no surprise, as he has been relied upon by most of Labour’s leading figures of recent years to handle political hot potatoes. From Donald Dewar and John Smith to Tony Blair, he has negotiated tricky waters, such as the introduction of one member, one vote to the abolition of Clause Four. He moved into No 10 with the unenviable job of being Mr Blair’s linkman with the unions. Later he was sent by Alastair Campbell to Kabul on a “hearts and minds” campaign during the Afghan war.

Yet few have heard of him; his public profile out of proportion to the high respect he commands in Westminster. In this, his first newspaper interview, he blushed to his red roots at any personal questions. For a minister, he is not very well known, is he? “I think you are being kind . . . We have all got our own character,” he said with not quite a shrug, that would be too expansive. “When I was working in No 10 I never sought to have any kind of high public profile, which sometimes staffers can have, and you may think that is odd for a politician, but I think you just try and do the job that you can.”

He grew up in Glasgow, the youngest of seven children to Irish Catholic parents. He has worked only briefly outside politics, at his own business consultancy, which had pretty much only one client. Which was? Well, the Post Office, as it happens.

It was only a few days’ work, he said, helping them to develop kiosks offering local information. Even in 2001, the Post Office was trying to reinvent itself, and failing. “It never really took off as a new product . . . information is so widely and freely available.”

As we packed up, he asked gently: “Do you think there is anything I can do to stop the headline reading ‘Postman Pat’?”

Branching out

— 2,500 post offices are expected to close this year under government plans

— Four million fewer people now visit the network of more than 14,000 post offices, the Post Office claims

— Fewer than 16 people a week used the 800 smallest rural post offices, at a cost to the taxpayer of £17 per visit

— The Communication Workers Union is taking the Post Office to court on behalf of 1,300 workers affected by the programme of franchising postal services from the Crown offices, the larger branches that are usually based in high streets

— The Post Office has so far franchised 37 Crown offices out of a planned 76.

— Critics say that public opposition to this has been ignored and that the franchises provide an inferior level of service for the elderly and disabled

— Crown offices have been transferred to WH Smith shops in Aberdeen, Blackpool, Bromley, Canterbury, Leicester, Torquay and Caerphilly

— MPs on the Business and Enterprise Select Committee said that there should be a presumption against closing a branch if it was the last shop in a village or a deprived urban area

The network of post offices should not be allowed to shrink further in a closure programme that is rushed and lacks full consultation, MPs said yesterday. The Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Committee also criticised managers at the Post Office, part of Royal Mail, for an “inexcusable lapse” in behaviour after they threatened sub-postmasters with reduced severance pay if they spoke out against the closures. The MPs said: “Post Office Ltd should be obliged to use its best endeavours to keep the network at a minimum of 11,500 fixed outlets.”

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