Has John McCain blown it? The presidential candidate's admission that he has not worked out how to use e-mail is being portrayed as evidence that the 71-year-old Republican is disconnected from the modern world.

Mind you, setting up an e-mail account was something that Tony Blair never managed in his ten years as front man for Cool Britannia. More intriguing still is Alastair Campbell's confession that he too was internet-illiterate in his period as a master of communication.

The telephone was more than 60 years old when the Second World War broke out. Yet the Prime Minister was only easily contactable if he stayed in the vicinity of Downing Street. Unfortunately, Neville Chamberlain preferred to spend his weekends at Chequers. The country house had only one telephone and it was there to help the kitchen staff to order supplies rather than to secure the survival of the British Empire.

Whenever Hitler made a surprise move, Chamberlain had to be whisked off to the butler's pantry.

This was no way to save the Western world and, as anyone who has visited the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall will have spotted, telephones were one of the few visible nods to modernity on Winston Churchill's desk.

But, in other respects, he could hardly claim to be au fait with the practicalities of life. Despite escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp, Churchill was engagingly clueless at daily chores. He travelled on the London Underground only once. Even this excursion went wrong. With childlike incompetence, he could not work out how to alight from the Circle Line and had to be rescued from the carriage having done a number of full circuits in it.

Given the gravity of the times, the issue was whether he could smash the Axis powers rather than, metaphorically, punch his way out of a paper bag. After all, Roy Jenkins, so regularly lauded as one of the greatest home secretaries of the 20th century, always claimed he did not know how to boil an egg.

Sometimes politicians ought to be too busy to surf the internet. Senator McCain should take his cue from Harold Macmillan, who managed simultaneously to admit that he did not watch television while showing off his knowledge of what was on it - “Not for me the joys of Half Hours with Hancock. No Dixon. No Maigret. No Chislebury. No Lone Ranger. No Lennie the Lion. It isn't actually that we can't afford a set at No10, but the trouble is my employers never actually give me an evening off.”

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