- 22 January 2026
- |Change, Technology, TLC, Uncategorized
It is 1997 and 19-year-old James Batchelor is wondering why he feels so clammy and nauseous.
Is it because of:
1. a dodgy curry?
2. the ill-fitting clothes he is wearing?
3. the fact he is about to meet the Prime Minister in 60 seconds’ time?
Well, technically, none of these individual options are correct because the answer is, in fact, all three.
Nearly 30 years ago my just-about-teenage self and my work colleagues – who were just as inexperienced as me at running a business – were invited to an unexpected meeting with the newly elected Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
The reason for this meeting was to discuss the potential of an increasingly popular invention called the Internet. In particular, Tony Blair wanted to thank us for a community website we had just built for the village of Trimdon, which was in his constituency at the time.
Hope and hitch-hiking
It was a story that had begun a few years before when I stood on the side of the road and stuck my thumb out.
I was a regular hitch-hiker as a teenager, and when I eventually went on to get my own car – always picked up other hitchhikers in cosmic gratitude for all those lifts (as I still do today if I see someone).
One of the people I picked up up was a guy named Phil. Sat next to each other in my little car, Phil and I soon realised we had two things in common; a love of computers and a passion for electronic music.
Within a few months we had set up the first company I ever co-founded, an Internet Service Provider named Daelnet, which brought the Worldwide Web to people in the Yorkshire Dales.
In 1997 we were approached by Teesside University to collaborate on a project called Trimdon 2000, which would involve building a community website for the village in one day – the first time this had ever been done.
It was a day which I will always remember as being filled with enthusiasm and optimism. We set up our monitors, modems and desktop towers in the village hall and, for 12 hours, local people came bearing archives, memories and artefacts, which we collated into Trimdon’s brand new website.
This website was complete with a map, built by me, marking the location of all of the local pubs using little pint glass icons.
So successful and popular did it prove as a project, that a few weeks later we were informed the newly minted Prime Minister and local MP Tony Blair wanted to make a visit to find out more, shake our hands and enjoy a photo opportunity.
An invite to meet the PM put our four-man team of scruffy computer geeks into a state of nervous excitement. We borrowed the smartest clothes we could and celebrated by visiting a local curry house which, it became increasingly clear the next morning, had almost certainly lied about its five-star hygiene rating.
When the time came for the meeting at the Trimdon Colliery & Deaf Hill Workmen’s Club, we all summoned the will to stave off the worst effects of food poisoning, shake the PM by the hand and guide him through the workings of the website. The six o’clock news even ran a segment on the visit, featuring Tony Blair perusing the pub map which I had produced.
At the time, this was almost too exciting for a young James Batchelor to comprehend and, over the years, I have developed a deep nostalgia for the period and an understanding of the significance of that day in particular.
Looking back, I can see that we were riding a wave of optimism about what the internet could achieve. There was a sense that the online revolution would usher in a new age, full of technologies that would democratise the world and change it for the better. The dark side of the web and its effect on our lives, the echo chambers it would create and mistrust of those who own and operate it was yet to take root. We were standing on the edge of a new era and the possibilities seemed endless.
It was also a time when there was tremendous hope in politics. Of course, we are now all aware of the controversies and upheaval that would come later in the tenure of New Labour, but following Tony Blair’s election in 1997 change really did seem possible, with a new government and a new start. It was tremendously exciting.
Would this hope ultimately be proved false? I’ll leave that for you to decide. But the vision and direction of the time surely owes much to the leadership style of Tony Blair and his ability to tell a clear and compelling story which so many believed.
Personally, the episode affirmed my commitment to developing technologies that connect people. I had seen firsthand the joy and benefits the web could bring and the part it played in community pride and cohesion.
What’s more, our work had been personally endorsed by the Prime Minister who, at the time, seemed more like a rock star than a politician. Far from simply parroting pre-prepared platitudes, Blair seemed to have a genuine passion and enthusiasm for what we were doing and its role in the future of the country. Indeed, during his time in office, the government ushered in a raft of policies and initiatives to accelerate the development and adoption of online technology.
Rediscovering some optimism
I don’t think it is any great insight to say that optimism is in much shorter supply today.
Those of us who can still bear to follow the news do so through our fingers, bracing for the next story which will shake our faith in politics, the environment, the economy or the future in general.
What I would love to see is a resurgence of a vision, for someone – no matter what political stripe they represent – to tell a story which brings people together to have faith things will get better, that we can take on the challenges we face and come out happier and more prosperous on the other side.
A vital part of this will involve government action to nurture and embrace technologies we now have at our disposal and their capacity to connect and support people. Let’s focus on using them to bridge gaps in society and improve our public services and people’s lives.
It is not too late to stop doom scrolling and rediscover some of the enthusiasm for the future of the world and technology, which I remember so keenly from nearly 30 years ago.