All of which bodes ill for e-government, a bold bid to deliver all services online by 2005. "One of the key ways in which businesses have applied e-commerce techniques is in managing their relationships with customers and suppliers," says an official in the Cabinet Office. "Public sector bodies must do the same if they are to derive the same benefits in terms of reduced costs and better procurement. The effect of the public sector doing this as a whole will itself be a significant contribution to advancing e-commerce."

Not to mention cutting the cost of government. Neil Mellor, program director of the e-government division at British Telecom—to which the government is outsourcing some of the work—points to the significant savings. The savings could be as high as £13.5 billion ($20.3 billion), he estimates—equivalent to a cut in income tax of between three and four pence in the pound. E-procurement and electronic service delivery alone could save £6 billion ($9 billion).

And already, points out a government official, work has begun on building the Internet portal through which citizens and businesses will communicate with government. Intended to be up and running this summer, it will provide relatively static information at first, but from a single source rather than multiple websites. Work on the second stage of the project—building links between the portal and government IT systems, so that, say, a change of address has to be communicated only once—will begin later this year.

But, ever accident-prone, the U.K. government soon slipped on yet another banana skin. Announced with a huge fanfare in April, officials forgot to check the name for the portal—U.K. Online. It's a great name for a portal, but it also happened to be the name of a middle-ranking Internet service provider, which was less than amused to find its name hijacked. Once again, awkward questions were asked in the House—this time from the member of Parliament in whose constituency the business is based.

An accommodation was apparently reached, and U.K. Online continues to be the name of the e-government portal. How? On what basis? Officials remain tight-lipped. Good lord, no, they say. We can't release information like that....