Off With Her Head

Oh this has made my day.

The Post Office have announced a new scheme whereby people will be able to pay for postage online and print out postage labels to stick onto letters and parcels. Just like the franked mail that companies have been sending out for years or the stickers that get printed for you at the Post Office when the postage on your package is a slightly unusual amount, these stickers just contain the minimum required information. They therefore don’t have the Queen’s head on them.

The BBC has a dispassionate and factual report on this. The Daily Mail, on the other hand, has taken a completely different view. Their headline is “The Queen’s head removed from postage stamps” (which isn’t even slightly accurate) and the story says that “the decision ends a tradition dating back more than 160 years”. It then turns into an extended rant about the creeping republicanism that the goverment are forcing on the country.

But it gets better than that. The Mail has (moderated) comments on all of its stories. And the readership, goaded on no doubt by the less than accurate story, are incandescent with rage. Not one of them shows any sign of knowing what is really happening.

You couldn’t make this up. It’s the funniest thing I’ve read for ages.