Believe it or not, I was quite excited ahead of this week’s Digital Britain report. Our business does a lot of work in the ‘digital media space’, darling, so really this should have been all about us. About how the Government was going to help us – well, our clients, but us by extension – rule the world in the next decade. I’ve also met Stephen Carter (aka Lord Barnes, or whatever his exalted title is now) once or twice, and have always found him both nice and clever – which is possibly why he couldn’t hack it in Westminster.

Anyway, as usual it turned out to be a crashing disappointment. 2mbps for everyone by 2012 is a truly pathetic ambition. Yes, in an ideal world it’d be nice for everyone to get broadband wherever they are (since that means more online customers). But for one thing, some of the people who don’t have broadband don’t even want it. And others choose to live in remote locations because they want some peace and quiet. Good for them – but why should I pay an extra 50p on my monthly phone bill so they can get their monthly Tesco delivery?

Then there’s the speed itself. 2mbps is absolutely miserable. We have that already in the office, and the two adjectives most commonly used to describe our internet connection are ‘slow’ and ‘erratic’ (in polite company, that is). I’d probably pay more to get a faster line, but apparently it’s the best we can get in this building. When you think that other countries are getting 90 mbps (so in two years, we’ll all be 45 times slower than Japan), it just highlights how pathetic the whole thing is. Last year I went to Singapore – the internet was so fast there that Google would come up with results before I even typed my search in.

Digital Britain really reminded me of the Millennium Dome, and not just because that was another monumental waste of taxpayers’ time and money. If any of you were unfortunate enough to visit, as I was, you may remember the BT Talk Zone – one of the features of which was a super-fast connection, presumably as a glimpse into the future of the internet. This was back in the days when I was used to dial-up, and I just couldn’t believe how instantaneous it was. Now, my memory may be playing tricks on me, but I genuinely think that nine years on, my broadband connection still isn’t that fast. And if this report is anything to go by, it presumably won’t be for a while yet.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. The Government’s so skint it can barely afford to buy a laptop, let alone the kind of kit we’d need to get the Scilly Islands surfing at 90mpbs. But if I ruled the world, my focus would be on making sure that business hubs have really super-fast access to the internet. Just think of the impact on productivity if we all spent less time staring at that stupid spinning egg-timer. OK, so the country folk would lose out – but at least they have the consolation of looking out their window at green fields, as opposed to the Old Kent Road.