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Influential commentators writing in The Times have helped to shape government policy for years. But this is surely the first time that a minister has been forced by a restaurant critic to call for action.

For make no mistake, this is all my doing. Since I first made my stand against bottled water in 2006 – incorporating penalty points for serving it into my restaurant ratings, vilifying its producers and mocking its consumers – consumption of the stuff has plummeted (probably). Far more restaurants than ever before offer tap water first and then bottled only as the Bling-Bling alternative. Punters who opt for the Perrier or Badoit now do so with a blush and an apology to diners at the next table.

In 2008 drinkers of bottled water are the new smokers.

Mineral water is a preposterous vanity. It is flown and shipped around the world, from France and Norway at best, from Japan and Fiji at worst. It is bottled in glass that is mostly thrown away and is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that never decomposes and just goes to landfill or ends up in an ocean “plastic patch” the size of Texas.

Food snobs and restaurant critics make a song and dance about mineral waters they like and don’t like. New York’s Ritz-Carlton even caters to the whim of abstemious punters with a dedicated water list and sommelier.

The vanity of it! While half the world dies of thirst or puts up with water you wouldn’t p**s in, or already have, we have invested years and vast amounts of money in an ingenious system that cleanses water of all nasties and delivers it, dirt-cheap, to our homes and workplaces in pipes, which we can access at a tap.

In 2006 we bought three billion litres of bottled water. I have no idea how much that is. But it seems a lot. Especially when we were fooled into buying it because of labels that said “pure as an alpine stream”, “bottled at the foot of a Mexican volcano” or “cleansed for three million years beneath a Siberian glacier”. What morons we are.

We spent £2 billion on the stuff. And then we grumble about water metering and annual domestic bills of a couple of hundred quid for water that is just as good, and whose consumption is unlimited. That £2 billion could go some way to mending the odd leak, towards digging the odd reservoir.

From the restaurants’ point of view it is just a clipping system. It’s more free money. The mark-ups are bigger even than they are on wine. You’ll pay £4 to £5 in most posh London restaurants for stuff no different, no different at all, from what you brushed your teeth in that morning (not leaving the tap on while doing so, I hope). The result is billions of unnecessary food miles, nonbiodegradable waste, millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, more urban pollution, hell in a handcart.

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