IT’S NOT JUST COLUMNISTS WHO COUNT

NO SOONER was the ink dry on my column last week, in which I complained about my treatment by ADT, than I received a personal phone call from one of the multinational’s senior executives.

After reading my piece, he said, he had looked into my case — and found that I had indeed been shockingly overcharged for my (very basic) burglar alarm system. By no less than £773.88, as it turned out.

Offering me handsome apologies, almost embarrassingly profuse, he went on to promise instant action to put the matter right.

Then a couple of days later, I had an email from a senior manager at More Th

He, too, offered me a profound apology for an ‘ administrative error’ in calculating my premium — ‘the first we’ve seen of this nature,’ he claimed — and promised me immediate redress. It’s not clear, by the way, if the error he meant was the fact that More Th

he mean it had been a mistake to charge me more for my buildings insurance, simply because I’m 68, rather than 86? Search me.

Well, I hate to sound ungrateful, and I’m naturally happy to have my money refunded. But the point is that before I aired my grievances against these firms in print, I’d been down the avenues open to other customers who question their bills, banging my head against brick walls every time. No top executives leapt to my assistance then.

Short of going to the trouble and expense of dragging offending multinationals through the courts, what hope is there for those who don’t happen to write columns in the country’s biggest- selling national daily newspaper?