The government can't win on Royal Mail, which is why the idea of a plotting Peter Mandelson intent on derailing talks should be discounted.

By Alex Stevenson

It's a Monday morning in late October. The post is already late, following two days of strikes last week. Further industrial action is due at the end of this one, imperilling - in addition to everything else - parents' applications to get their children into their first-choice school. Individuals are being affected, too. My great-granny won't be getting a card from me on her 96th birthday. My mortgage application has been hampered by delays, risking the whole stressful process. Forgive me for a bit of teeth-gnashing.

This personal reaction is not, yet, reflected across the country. A poll for the BBC carried out last week found twice as many respondents supported the unions as did the Royal Mail. Yet there is only one direction in which the public mood can head. More strikes will lead to growing public anger as the inconvenience of slow-moving post grows and grows.

The government is already horribly exposed. Strikes are an indirect blow against its credibility. Worse still, having pinned its colours to the mast of Royal Mail, it now finds itself defending the policies of what is potentially a fast-sinking ship. As long as the strikes drag on the credibility of the government is damaged more and more.

So why would Milord Mandelson act to disrupt the talks? The idea is absurd. Yet that is exactly what the leaders of the Communication Workers' Union are claiming. "He's not telling the truth about what the dispute's about," whined deputy general secretary Dave Ward this morning. The unions, being trade unions, feel embattled, isolated and threatened. The emergence of a document outlining a Royal Mail strategy which allows strike action to go ahead because it damages the unions entrenched this feeling. Yet government rhetoric about the "self-defeating" nature of the strikes makes the strategy suggested by this document equally self-defeating. Royal Mail's survival is at stake. The unions do not realise their true strength, nor their inability to get what they want.

Dealing with this prospect is too much for any man, even if that man is Lord Mandelson. The idea of an all-powerful first secretary of state whose authority permeates every department in Whitehall is about as far from the truth as it gets. He has the ear of the prime minister, of course. But he is not capable of exerting any real pressure on this clash. The struggling third-term Labour government, drained of support from its backbenches, is about as effective in getting these talks afloat as a beached whale.

Don't forget this is Mandelson's fault, of course. His refusal to drop key clauses in the postal services bill, which would have seen the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail through a postal services firm taking a minority stake, led to its abandonment before the summer recess prior to reaching the Commons. The government knew it could not enter the lower House without being torn apart by Labour's disillusioned left. Inaction was the result, an inaction which cannot be resolved now the moment of crisis has arrived.

Of course Mandelson will do all he can to prevent further strike action, for the government can only lose out as these punishing strikes continue to take their toll. But the idea of him deliberately trying to derail them is absurd.