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Post Office Limited has just announced the results of its consultation on the proposed closure of 169 sub post offices in London. Only seven have been reprieved with six others still subject to review. But this bad if expected news seems to have bypassed Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith.

Not only have three of the six branches in the Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham been reprieved but this comes on top of the assurances about the East Acton Crown Office last month and a renewed commitment from PO Ltd to reopen the Olympia branch.

I am of course disappointed that some much loved branches – like those in Goldhawk Road and Churchfield Road, Acton - are still closing, but this is a better result than we can have hoped for. I hope it is a vindication of the approach that I have taken in arguing the local case on its merits and the detailed and professional work done by local residents’ bodies.

Five Post Offices threatened with closure in the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham will now stay open. In an extraordinary turnaround, Post Office Limited have reprieved the offices at Starch Green, Shepherds Bush Road and Kenyon Street. The East Acton office that serves the Old Oak Estate in Shepherds Bush will also now stay open as part of a Costcutter store and PO Ltd have assured local MP Andy Slaughter that the Olympia office which shut at Christmas will reopen as soon as possible on a nearby site.

What makes this more remarkable is that only seven in total of the 169 branches targeted for closure across London will now survive. In addition the Bollo Bridge Road office which serves the South Acton Estate is one of only six which are still being reviewed and may stay open.

Commenting on the outcome of Post Office Limited’s consultation, local MP Andy Slaughter said: ‘This is a good result, especially in Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith. To save five of eight threatened branches, when only seven in total have been reprieved in London is a great achievement. It shows what the community can achieve by working together in a coordinated and organised way.

‘As soon as the proposals were announced in February, I realised it would be just gesture politics to oppose every closure. So I visited every post office under threat found out which were viable and which postmasters wanted to stay and built a campaign around the particular needs and facilities of each office and community. We held a packed public meeting in Askew Road and I wrote to over 17,000 households affected by the closures.

‘The campaign attracted press and TV coverage, especially over the loss of offices serving blind and disabled people’s homes. W14 was identified as the only postal district in the country to lose all its post offices. Over three thousand people wrote to me with their representations and I presented these both to Post Office Limited and the House of Commons..

‘Local residents’ groups and the council also campaigned with the aim of saving some of the threatened offices and this tactic appears to have paid off. Post Office Limited realised that Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith were taking too much pain and that they were planning to close viable offices like those in Shepherds Bush Road and Starch Green.

‘The only sour note of the past three months was the attempt by local conservatives to break the all and non-party coalition to try and score political points. I think they had their fingers burnt over this when residents realised that what they were offering in place of a reduced but viable network was no network at all. But it was unhelpful in wasting time and diverting us from our central goal of keeping post offices open.

‘I congratulate all the postmasters and their customers who have fought such a brilliant campaign – whether successful or not in every case - It has shown what we can achieve working as a community.'

I can’t say I was overjoyed by the election results last Thursday, but on reflection there were some things to be less miserable about, as I wrote in the Ealing Times, this week. I was glad to see Murad Qureshi, our excellent London Assembly candidate, elected for one of the London-wide seats, and that we took a seat off the Tories in Brent & Harrow. But try as I might the prospect of a right-wing maverick from the shires running London fills me with dread – though I suspect the same is true for the Tories.

Almost everyone who came to my surgery this week began the conversation by saying ‘terrible news about Ken’ or some such similar lament for Mr Livingstone’s demise. As well as being grateful for the sharing of grief at the passing of perhaps London’s most iconic politician, this confirmed my view that the Mayoral election had touched on people in a way even General Elections can fail to do. The huge increase in turnout, that saw Livingstone lose despite getting nearly half as many votes again as four years ago, showed a lot was at stake.

The results for Labour in London – and locally – were much better than in the rest of the country. Livingstone scored 12% more than Labour nationally, and lost 53 to 47 in the run off. The London Assembly seats saw swings of up to 6% to the Tories in the suburbs and 3% to Labour in East London, but nothing on the scale of the double digit swings in England and Wales. In West London there were small swings to the Tories in the Assembly votes but in council by-elections in Ealing and Hammersmith, no swing or even a swing against the incumbent Tory councils, despite huge efforts and spending by them.

But none of this can dispel the disappointment of losing the Mayoralty. I think it is right to give anyone newly elected time to show their true colours, and Boris Johnson has already said he wishes to prove that much of his reputation is misplaced. But he has already made it pretty clear in whose interests he will be governing. He intends to scrap the higher rate congestion charge for gas guzzlers. He aims to restrict bus travel for under 18s and possibly for pensioners too. He has abandoned the 50% target for affordable homes – saying we need to build for young single professionals, not families or poorer people. With his history of insulting everyone from ethnic minorities to whole cities and countries he seems an unlikely figure to lead London.