All politics is local: new year, ancient cliché. Yet true, for all that. The humble and dull are generally more eloquent than the big speeches and the big names. Posterity's compositor prefers familiar metal. He spells it out: what do the governed really want from those who seek to govern?

You could have faced 1200 words this morning on the character and prospects of Gordon Brown, a prime minister. It would not have counted as fun, I think, but it would have been Very Serious. And Deeply Thoughtful. At a push it would have added a footnote to what historians will one day remember as the Higher Trivia. Count yourself spared.

People who are paid to worry about these things fret over voter apathy in the mature democracies. I don't. I know a rational choice when I see one. The buying power of the proletariat's gone down, generally, and no-one believes a word. The governed do not get what the governed want. That just about covers it.

So what might finish Mr Brown? A global recession in his globalised economy would do the trick. Further evidence of institutionalised corruption wouldn't help. Having screwed with your pension, he might yet screw the notional value of your bricks and mortar. Afghanistan - not Iraq - will meanwhile haunt 2008 like a bloody shroud manifested in the night. But why go to melodramatic extremes?

If the Prime Minister is intent on destroying himself, something small and local will suffice. David Cameron need not get a tousled look in. If Mr Brown wants an Ibsen ending to his time as our master builder, he could allow a single, elementary mistake. He could close my post office.

The Westminster village has not, I think, seen this one coming. The tiny, shiny world of wireless e-government, of blogging polls and virtual popularity, does not encompass wee actual places in the January rain. It inserts inverted commas around "community" and designs a future in which everyone resembles a plastic figure in a neat architect's model. That is not - I trust my jargon is in order - "smart".

The headline numbers are easy to come by, however. There are about 14,200 post offices in these united kingdoms. Post Office Ltd would like to close 2500 of them. It says that Britain's largest retail operation has suffered a sharp decline in customers. It argues, moreover, that eight in every 10 of 7700 rural offices run at a loss, that the 800 smallest country branches see only 16 customers in an average week and that the cost to the honest taxpayer of the transactions involved is £17 a pop.

My reaction, as a taxpayer, is as brief as it gets: so?

There are 1650 post offices in Scotland, according to the estimable Postwatch Scotland. Currently, 44 branches, urban and rural, from a total of 308 in Greater Glasgow, Central Scotland, and Argyll & Bute, are under threat. Mike Weir MP, of the SNP, is unhappy both with the six-week timescale allowed for "consultations", with the implications for the Highlands and the north-east, and with - he must forgive the precis - the general idea.

Mr Weir wants a review. I think he has a point. Were I sitting in Downing Street tracking the papers I might not be too concerned this morning, though, about a predictably bolshy columnist. I might even manage to discount popular sentiment. If people fail to use their local post office, people cannot be too troubled by a closure programme. That may be why, how-ever, I am not in Downing Street preparing a media briefing for a prime minister losing the plot.

From privatisation to PFI, from the Balkanisation of the NHS to the debauching of comprehensive education, new/old Labour doesn't get it. Some things have an intrinsic worth. Community existed before "community" and all those other buzzing little words. Ideas of social value and social utility are not, therefore, topics for "reform". In my village - three words I never imagined typing - people depend on their post office.

More grisly jargon. "The government" (it says here) "has set out specific access criteria for the post office network." Bear this quaint idea in mind. It matters. It involves, after all, the antique notion that those to whom we delegate power will exercise it rationally, and always on our behalf.

To wit. If Post Office Ltd must slaughter the branch network - and hands up who remembers Dr Beeching? - certain proprieties must, according to the instructions of our government, be observed.

Thus: 90% of the UK population will be within one mile of their nearest branch, and "99% of the UK population will be within three miles of the nearest branch". Otherwise, "95% of the total population within Urban Areas' will be within one mile of the nearest branch" and "99% of the total population within Deprived Urban Areas' will be within one mile of the nearest branch".

Fair enough? The "criterion" - Whitehall is tough on pluralisms - says that "95% of the total population within Rural Areas' will be within three miles of the nearest branch". It further specifies that "95% of the population of each postcode district will be within six miles of their nearest branch".

To paraphrase a certain American candidate: no dodgy codger left behind. Still, tried catching a bus "within six miles" lately? Tried to work out how many people other than "90% of the UK population" there are? Attempted to guess how many "Deprived Urban Areas" still cling to their battered Fort Apache post offices? Thought not.

We haven't got to the good bit yet. The good bit is that a government capable of dictating an "access criterion" has "no veto" over any business decisions Post Office Ltd might elect to make. It can tell it what not to do, but it can't - for this is the universe of "access" and "choice" - tell it to leave your post office alone. Can't be helped.

It's official, though, and even legal. It is also, says one who has been around the block, a lie.

Post office closures are about to give Mr Brown his worst headache since he didn't inhale. To pretend that his government has no power in the matter is absurd, insulting and absurdly insulting. For the sake of buttons - or a day's subsidy to the shareholders of Northern Rock - he will allow the country to be defaced. Great comeback. All politics is local, and nothing is as local as a post office counter.

From my window, I watch the indefatigable old ladies come and go. They do not talk, often, of Michelangelo, least of all when the sky is leaking buckets and January is bleak. They tramp up the brae with their letters and gossip. They inhabit a world in which the reliability of institutions is fundamental, in which trust matters. Who betrays that, or them?

Don't allow them to tell you, on January 7, that "nothing can be done" about insulting "consultations" and slow death for the post office network. If Mr Brown wishes to save himself, if he even understands his own plight, he can begin with the small, the local, and the mundane.

All politics is local. And some cliches have earned the right to be old caressed slugs of familiar lead.