CAMPAIGNING against a decision of the bureaucracy is never easy. If it were of course, at least one of the purposes of having Members of Parliament would disappear.

But this week, the Post Office broke new ground among public bodies in demonstrating either complete internal confusion or deliberate public two-facedness.

I heard from a Post Office official by telephone on Monday 10th December that one of the three sub post offices which I had been campaigning to save, Stamford East (Ryhall Road), was indeed going to be reprieved, one of only two out of the total 77 under threat of closure in the East Midlands. Of course I was grateful for that. And there will now be a great deal of celebrating at that end of my constituency.

The other two I had lobbied for, Rippingale and Castle Bytham, I was told would be reviewed further with Postwatch. That looked like good news at least for the moment. The Rippingale postmaster himself, Simon Deane, had been told the same thing. And it was all confirmed in a publication from the Post Office dated 10th December.

Then some 24 hours later, the Post Office issued a press release saying that all eleven sub post offices earmarked for “further review” including Castle Bytham and Rippingale were in fact going to be closed. The only thing to be reviewed was the form of outreach solution to be implemented.

Was this deliberate deception or an internal communication failure? If the latter, it seems rather odd that an internal message saying “not closed” got translated into “closed”, a remarkably radical reversal of the truth.

Or, as so many of my constituents now believe, is the review exercise in fact utterly bogus, with the result – closure – already determined in advance so that all the Post Office’s press spokesman bungled was that the closure decision was not supposed to be revealed at this point?

I don’t know. Nor does the minister, Pat McFadden, to whom I spoke on Wednesday. But we are all surely entitled to find out.

The county council, at my request, and I trust to general gratitude, have agreed in principle to help fund a judicial review if required, and it is looking ever more like being required.

I am sure that the lawyers are looking forward to it already.