The Wiki Man | 19 April 2008

My article last week (‘Mad Men are taking over the world’) led me to be accused of elitism by one of the magazine’s online readers.

What riled him was my suggestion that, rather than spending £6 billion on speeding up the Eurostar journey by an hour, it might have been better to spend a few million quid providing WiFi to the passengers, allowing them to make better use of their time on the train. I was told that this was typical of the ‘businessman’s arrogant assumption that only business passengers mattered’ — and what about people who wanted to go to Paris for leisure?

In reply I said this chap seemed a pretty rum kind of populist if he thought it reasonable to make the 45 million people in Britain who never want to go to Paris pay £100 each — i.e. almost the cost of a year’s upgrade to Sky Sports — just so Mr Egalitarian here could get to the Musée d’Orsay at 11 a.m.