Cameron: The first iPM?

Rory Cellan-Jones | 09:44 UK time, Tuesday, 13 July 2010

The man standing on a step in his back garden seemed passionate about the internet and what it could do for his country. Addressing a collection of chief executives, some civil servants and a scattering of new web users, he promised to give Britain the fastest, best broadband network in the world.

So is David Cameron the first prime minister who really gets the internet? Or was he, to quote a former Conservative PM, "inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity" when meeting so many digital types in one place?

The event in the Downing Street garden was the launch of Martha Lane Fox's Manifesto for a Networked Nation with its audacious promise to get the whole of the UK workforce online by the time Mr Cameron has to face the electorate again.

First, the PM met several members of Ms Lane Fox's Digital Task Force, people who've learned to use the internet in recent years. They sat around the cabinet table telling him their inspiring stories. People like Emilyn Hutchinson, who started using a computer at a shelter for the homeless when she was 17 and is now studying for a degree, or Jackie Seer, who set up an online community support network for people living on her estate in West London.

Then his techie credentials were burnished by his Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt who told the guests that the PM was the proud owner not only of a blackberry but an Apple iPad - Mr Cameron later confirmed that he sits surfing on the iPad via a wireless network in his Downing Street flat, while watching television. But even Mr Hunt may have been a little taken aback by his boss's subsequent promise to take Britain right to the top of the world broadband league.

The government's recent pledge to deliver the fastest broadband in Europe - which I compared to taking West Ham to the top of the Premiership in five years - already looked a bit of a stretch. Now, apparently we are going to go speeding past South Korea -according to a recent speech by Jeremy Hunt, the UK is currently ranked 33rd in the world when it comes to broadband speed, with an average that is nearly five times slower than that in South Korea.

This Thursday the culture secretary has summoned Britain's major telecoms businesses to an event where they will thrash Britain's broadband future. On the agenda are two pressing matters - first, delivering the minimum 2Mbps coverage promised across the country by 2012, then working out how to build a next-generation network of super-fast broadband which will reach the third of the country that the market will probably ignore.

The broadband suppliers are already sucking their teeth about the cost of laying fibre to every farm - and warning ministers that it will cost more than the few hundred million pounds that they have budgeted. Now it seems the PM wants them to show that Britain can be a world champion.

I have just done a quick search through the BBC web archive and came up with this article from 10 years ago. The prime minister then said he wanted the entire population using the web by 2005, promised that Britain would lead the world in e-commerce, and that all government services would be delivered online.

Now David Cameron does seem a lot more at ease with technology than Tony Blair ever did. But before we decide that he's our first iPM, let's see where we stand in the world broadband league a few years from now.