Even Boris Johnson’s most ardent admirers in the Conservative Party, who now apparently include the neophiliac former broadband minister Matt Hancock, would concede that he is not a technological visionary. Here, in the age of the network, we have a prospective prime minister who would be more at home in the age of Plutarch.

Perhaps, therefore, we should not be too harsh on Johnson and his undeliverable pledge to connect every home in Britain to full-fibre broadband by 2025. His preference for myth over reality may merely be an artefact of a classical education. Johnson’s broadband fable must be the involuntary outburst of a frontal lobe permanently intoxicated by too many late nights marvelling at Aesop.

His claim that ubiquitous full-fibre coverage is possible in “five years at the outside” is obviously false to anyone with a passing familiarity with the scale of the challenge. Johnson surely would not turn to such crude dishonesty even at this dramatic stage in his long pursuit of power. His hero’s journey is lurching toward tragedy of either the individual or national variety. This cannot be the time for blatantly misleading his supporters, can it?

Maybe instead Johnson is just badly advised, as he clearly was in the recent debate over the new European copyright directive. He proclaimed it was “a classic EU law to help the rich and powerful” and “terrible for the internet”.