The title of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel No One Writes to the Colonel could not possibly apply to Bulgaria. It turns out that everyone writes to the General. Since he has been, respectively, mayor of Sofia and now Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Boiko Borissov no longer seems to use the rank of general conferred on him in his Interior Ministry days. Yet he appears to continue to have the appeal of someone who can Get Things Done.

This much was apparent from a remark in an interview a few weeks ago, in which Borissov mentioned that the number of letters that he had received since taking office as head of government in July last year was vastly larger than those sent to his predecessor, Sergei Stanishev.

Which is ironic, by the by, considering the public spat that the two had about the letter sent from Brussels to the previous government warning that Bulgaria was at risk of losing EU environment operational programme funds. Borissov said that Stanishev’s government had hidden the letter; Stanishev called him a liar.

Given the huge difference in incoming correspondence, it would seem that letters to Stanishev would have been easier to find. There is a cartoon crying out to be drawn of Borissov’s close-cropped head peeking out from a pile of correspondence (yes, letters – by Borissov’s account, 90 per cent come in envelopes, not by e-mail).

Borissov even had a letter from the Spanish ambassador in Sofia, as the representative of the current presidency of the EU, praising the Government’s efforts against organised crime. But then, Borissov has had less pleasant reading, from the EU about the land swops, and even a letter a short while after the Haiti earthquake disaster, from two Bulgarian residents of the island calling on the Government in Sofia to do more. When you are seen as a Messiah, no miracle is too much to ask.

Somehow, it is touching that any number of those letters must come from ordinary Bulgarians who know Borissov as nothing other than an image on a television screen and who believe that their petitions can be fulfilled. That is besides those correspondents, of a variety found worldwide, who are in the habit of keeping national leaders informed of messages from space aliens transmitted via the shelves in their bathroom cabinets, or metal plates in their head, or somesuch.

I do hope that all the letters are archived, and after some decades, published in compilation, preferably in time for the Christmas rush.