New issues -
🇬🇬 Guernsey Post -
30 October 2025 - Christmas, The Twelve Days of Christmas - issues for Guernsey and Alderney. Both sets designed by Caroline Veron and lithographed by bpost. Self-adhesive with rouletted perforations, These are attractive stamps but are just part of an enormously bloated new issue programme for such a small postal administration. Rating:- *.
- 7 stamps, total cost £8.80.
🇬🇬 issues inscribed Alderney -
7 stamps, total cost £8.80.
One that got away -
🇬🇧 Royal Mail -
13 October 2025 - Centenary of the birth of Margaret Thatcher, first woman prime minister of the United Kingdom.
We are all now fully aware that those who decide on which subjects will be featured on the expensive confetti of sticky paper which now masquerades as postage stamps released by the United Kingdom’s national postal service, Royal Mail, have concluded that the only subjects worthy of being featured on that sticky paper are aged popular musicians and American culture and not significant British figures and events. So this year Royal Mail stamps have joyously celebrated the US cartoon, Peanuts, a flock of various ducks because ducks are popular on social media, a board game invented in America and an antique collection of Antipodean musicians whose name I have already forgotten.
In Blog 2781 I identified that an issue to commemorate the 1100th anniversary of the first English king, Athelstan had been rejected or merely overlooked and previously an issue to commemorate the 250th birth anniversary of JMW Turner, possibly England’s most important painter, had failed to appear on the list of 2025 stamp releases.
Now, another significant anniversary of a most important figure in modern British history is to go without philatelic commemoration by the postal service of the country which was radically changed by her time in office. I refer of course to the the centenary of the birth of Margaret Thatcher, significant if for no other reason, because she was the first woman to be elected as the United Kingdom’s prime minister. Her politics was radical and often described as divisive and she was loved and loathed in equal measure. But she was undoubtedly one of the most significant British political figures of the 20th century, dwarfing many of the men who held the premiership. As the first woman to be prime minister, she opened the door to the advancement of women, even if many of them disliked her politics intensely, and most postal authorities would have commemorated the first woman who held the same position in their country on the centenary of their birth.
Doubtless, there would have been some protests about Lady Thatcher being commemorated on a British stamp and clearly as a historical figure she is dwarfed by the lead singer of AC/DC or the American creator of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, but we must view the omission of a stamp commemorating Mrs T as another example of a Royal Mail “one that got away”. At least last year, RM did commemorate Sir Winston Churchill’s 150th birthday anniversary - one can just imagine the pain caused to the stamp programme planners as they struggled to find a reason not to issue a Churchill commemorative stamp.
Royal Mail did commemorate Baroness Thatcher by the issue of a single stamp on 14 October 2014, close to her birthday, 18 months after her death, though it was part of a set of 8 stamps featuring former British prime ministers who were selected to appear on the set to provide political balance especially as so many people would then have complained about a commemoration of Mrs T by herself.
