The Dome and Mr Mandelson

PETER Mandelson's friend did not mince his words. "Some people, who like to feel popular and admired, would find it astonishing and terrible if they were in his shoes, with everything that's being thrown at him about the Dome. But Peter is not like that. He positively thrives on it." The friend added that, of course, Mandelson feels beleaguered: "But that is how he has spent his entire political life."

To appreciate this is to understand how Mandelson, the Minister without Portfolio, can confront the job of managing the centrepiece of the nation's millennium celebrations and still appear not only sane, but cheerful. He has thrown himself body and soul into deciding how we should commemorate the 2,000th birthday of Jesus Christ. He loves it. At the fashionable London dinner parties he attends, he refers to it as "my dome". He spends a large part of each day poring over plans, often working late into the night, coming back again, fresh, early the next morning. He is dealing with people on his wavelength - hip, trendy creative teams, designers and choreographers. His enthusiasm, say those around him, is irrepressible.

Mandelson is putting on a remarkably brave face for, such is the scale of the task, such was the size of the mess that he inherited, and such is the willingness of a sceptical media to knock it at every turn, that even Mandelson, the consummate calculating politician, may, after all, have made a monumental error. "Even if you think that what he does in the end is a success, between now and that moment of judgement, he will have a bucket of shit poured over his head every single day," said his friend. "Has he got enough political capital to withstand that? He is receiving, and will receive, so much crap that you have to wonder, it is not worth the prize - even if the prize is there."

It should never have been this way, of course. If everything had gone to plan, we would be mentally crossing off the days by now, eagerly awaiting the unveiling of the contents of the great tent by the River Thames at Greenwich. Instead, the buoyant optimism of Mandelson and his cohorts apart, the general mood towards the Dome appears altogether different: cynical; resigned to failure; angry that so much money, pounds 758m, may be about to be squandered.

From the outset, the concept of the Millennium Exhibition has been wobbly. Historians would not have been surprised. The Festival of Britain of 1951 was beset by initial gloom and uncertainty, as Mandelson well knows. That signal that the hairshirt days of the war were well and truly over was the brainchild of his maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, the then Lord President of the Council. In order to achieve a success on London's South Bank, Morrison, as is documented in a book Mandelson has studied, A Tonic to the Nation, the Festival of Britain 1951, had to overcome considerable opposition. His friends insist that the fact that Morrison did so is embedded in his grandson's mind and lies behind his refusal to be cowed.

However, the problems of 1951 were different from those that began in 1992 with the declaration by the then Heritage Secretary, Peter Brooke, that Britain intended to commemorate the millennium. In 1951, some ministers, plus the government's opponents, treated the exercise as a sort of covert political gesture; today, the problems are essentially organisational. But the result is still the same: isolation for Morrison then; isolation for his grandson now.

While lottery cash was to be used, it also had to be matched by private funds. In the 1990s, this has created a double-edged sword. Some ministers, notably Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, deplore the involvement of public money, pointing out that the Great Exhibition of 1851 was financed from private sources. On the other

now being masterminded by Mark McCormack, the American agent, has led to accusations that a great national event is being commercialised.

Michael Heseltine, the then deputy prime minister, was the driving force behind the celebration, which gave rise to charges of favouritism. Greenwich in the east Thames corridor, an area he has long championed, was selected in preference to Birmingham. This decision, trivial to those in the metropolis (who include many politicians who are seduced by the capital's glamour and proximity to power) carries great resonance beyond the M25. Outside London, antagonism and derision for the Dome is the general rule. It is seen as another example of politicians looking after their own, of putting London first - a fact that should alarm organisers relying on crowds from all over the country to make ends meet.

Birmingham, as its representatives never cease to point out, would not have experienced the same difficulties as Greenwich. The site of the second city's National Exhibition Centre could easily have absorbed the project. Birmingham is centrally based and could claim to be more "national". It would have been much cheaper to build and wealthy local entrepreneurs, such as the Richardson twins, multi-millionaire developers of the Merry Hill shopping centre, were ready and willing to chip in.

Rather than a clean, greenfield location in Birmingham, close to the nation's motorway hub, an old gasworks riddled with noxious waste in Greenwich, an area notorious even by London standards for its poor transport links, was chosen. Sir Richard (now Lord) Rogers was asked to create a dome structure, and Imagination, a firm of consultants in design and concept, was invited to come up with a plan to fill it.

The notion of a dome is a weakness as much as a strength. For all its promise of providing an enormous, uncluttered space - four Albert Halls we are told repeatedly - the Dome is open to easy ridicule. It has become a tabloid mocker's dream, a by-word for waste of public money, a building that, no matter how hard its proponents talk it up, is, once all is said and done, a circular tent. And it has become identified, through a mixture of calculation and circumstance, with one politician's vaulting ambition. It is now the "Mandelson Dome" and ever since Tony Banks referred to him as "the Dome Secretary" that is what he has become.

Imagination's plan, originally intended for Birmingham, was meant to embrace the whole nation. Large mini-domes, each conveying an aspect of British life down the ages and in the future, would be based in the regions coming together in the main central dome. Described as grandiose and a logistical nightmare by its detractors in Whitehall, the Imagination idea was not without merit. But because of the casual way in which the project was allowed to develop, Imagination, a team of avant-garde designers, effectively took charge of the project. Their vivid imaginations, said those close to the project in Whitehall, were running away with them.

For this, the Conservative government, in the shape of Heseltine - a minister notorious for being big on broad-brush strokes and small on detail - was to blame. He was supposedly in overall control, with the Millennium Commission underneath him. A company, Millennium Central Limited, was established to take charge of the event. But there was nobody in direct, hands-on control. Businesses tapped for cash by an anxious government found themselves talking to designers eulogising over vague concepts, not to the hard-headed executives they were used to dealing with.

Barry Hartop, chief of the Welsh Development Agency, was drafted in to sort out the numbers and persuade would-be investors. But Hartop was hired on just a three- month contract for a project more than three years from fruition. After drawing up a budget of pounds 1.1bn - a figure that rang alarm bells throughout Whitehall - Hartop left. Jennie Page, the formidable chief executive of the Millennium Commission ("autocratic" was another word used to describe her by a former colleague), took over.

The gathering gloom about Britain's star attraction in the year 2000 was not dissipated by the election. Senior Tories, perhaps sensing impending defeat and keen to portray themselves as thrifty, appeared to lose interest. Companies, uncertain about the political and economic future, put their spending plans on hold. While in opposition, Labour did not embrace the Dome, viewing it as a Tory idea which had been knocked in the newspapers that Tony Blair was so anxious to please. What Labour did was to raise questions about the cost.

ENTER Blair and Mandelson. In his book on Blair's first 100 days, Derek Draper, once Mandelson's adviser, recalls the dilemma facing the new Prime Minister. Should he scrap the Dome or risk the costs mounting and the humiliation of failure? "This decision is the most difficult I've had to take," Draper reports Blair as saying."I should really cancel it, but my gut instinct tells me otherwise."

According to legend, the clincher was a letter from Simon Jenkins, newspaper columnist, member of the Millennium Commission, and vociferous supporter of the Dome, to Blair setting out how the exhibition would appeal to his children. In reality, the deciding factor, and one that has provided much ballast for Mandelson in private at Westminster since, was John Prescott.

The Deputy Prime Minister's view, sought by Blair, was that "if we can't make this work, we're not much of a government". Characteristically bold and simplistic, Prescott's opinion disguised a myriad underlying problems: lack of sponsors; nobody in charge; no firm ideas for the content of the Dome once Imagination's had been quietly shelved; an urgent need to improve transport around Greenwich.

By rights, the job of turning fiasco into triumph should have gone either to Prescott, in whose brief the Dome fell, or to Chris Smith, the culture minister. Neither got the job. Blair bypassed them and went to his Minister without Portfolio. Part of the reason was that Mandelson wanted the job. He knew the fillip the 1951 success had provided to his grandfather's career and he saw the Dome as a great test of the Government's ability. And, above all, say his friends, he relished the thought of having a proper job, of getting his teeth into something tangible. Another factor was that Blair felt happier handing the Dome to the most energetic member of his team with a prodigious work rate, who had connections throughout business and the arts, and had proven himself in the past, on internal party matters, to be a supreme organiser.

Mandelson, ever the shrewd chess-player, thinking moves ahead, laid down one condition: he would not do the job unless Prescott and Smith were 100 per cent behind him. Once those assurances had been obtained, Mandelson could begin the task of emulating his grandfather.

After a shaky start last August, when Tony Blair was on holiday, leaving Mandelson and Prescott to mind the shop - the Prime Minister had to tell him, after a torrent of negative press for the Government, to avoid in future becoming the story - he has recovered. A smooth, polished performance before a questioning Culture Select Committee was the best moment in his Commons career.

He went to Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida, not to see the white-knuckle rides, but to observe what Disney does even better: queuing. This does not bode well for the Dome, but it does indicate one of the main obstacles with the project: how to keep 30,000 people, the sort of figures required to make the exhibition pay, amused at any one time without the whole thing descending into anarchy. Less publicly, and more significantly in terms of what the Dome is likely to contain, Mandelson has also been to Futuroscope, the hi-tech and more educational theme park in Poitiers, France.

Two departures have caused a stir and have been greeted with relish by his opponents. The first, by Sir Cameron Mackintosh, was a serious blow to the Dome and, once his political future had come to depend on it, to Mandelson. Asked to dream up a show to occupy the attention of 12,000 people inside the Dome, Mackintosh, the producer of Cats and Miss Saigon, apparently conceived a stunner. Called About Time, it involved 1,000 children and would have been set in a spectacular theatre. Trouble was, it was over the top, even for Mandelson and certainly for the likes of more sober, cost-conscious ministers like Gordon Brown. At pounds 250m, Mackintosh's vision would have swallowed a third of the project's entire budget.

While Mandelson reluctantly had to say no to Mackintosh - the two remain on warm terms - there was little sadness in the sacking of Stephen Bayley, the designer brought in to fill the Dome. On one level, Mandelson and Bayley, doyen of "Swinging London" creativity, were made for each other. On another, say those working on the Dome, they fought like two ferrets, matching and fighting each other in terms of egos and vanity.

Bayley said he was in charge, Mandelson said he was merely the designer. Bayley's public pronouncements only served to question the credibility of the whole project and dishearten those toiling away beneath him: "There are a million other things you could have done. I would have liked to see trees planted in every brown-field site in Britain" and Bayley's claim it would be "awe-inspiring, fabulous" if the Dome was left empty, did not endear him to the minister in charge.

Described in publicity material sent out after his appointment as "the second most intelligent man in Britain" (giving rise to speculation among those working on the Dome that Mandelson, presumably, was the first) Bayley's departure, say Mandelson's allies, was just a matter of time. He has been replaced by a group of heavyweights drawn from film and broadcasting: Michael Grade, Sir David Puttnam and Alan Yentob. The last took time off from his BBC duties to accompany Mandelson on his trip to Disney.

According to those closely involved, two areas, rather than three, still give cause for concern. Creating the transport infrastructure is going slowly, and, while Mark McCormack is said to have secured pledges of pounds 120m towards his target of pounds 150m, no deals have actually been signed. That is because companies are waiting to see what they are sponsoring before parting with their cash - hence the controversial push by Blair to attract Japanese money on his trip to Japan last week. But the third area, the contents of the Dome, is said to be provoking less worry.

The tent will contain nine exhibition areas, based on themes ranging from "Who We Are" to "Where We Live" and "What We Do". Interactive holograms will feature large, especially in a section called "The Tower of Serious Play". Despite the absence of Mackintosh, it is still planned to hold music shows, although not on quite the same scale. Anxious to avoid being accused of lack of spirituality and of ignoring Jesus Christ's 2,000th birthday, Mandelson and his colleagues have set aside an area to cover all religions and faiths. And there will be a chapel for Christian prayer.

There is now absolutely no chance, say insiders, of the Dome not being built or the exhibition not going ahead. Until we are told what it will contain, none of us can properly judge it, and it is being stressed that, even then, we will still be looking at artists' impressions: only when the year 2000 comes will we be equipped to give our verdict.

Mandelson is cast in a role for which he is eminently suited, as magician extraordinaire. At present, all that can be seen is 12 yellow spokes held together by lengths of wire. The rest we can only dream about.

What is certain, say his friends, is that the conjurer is not losing any sleep about it. "When he goes home at midnight, Peter is not hiding under his duvet, worrying," said one. "He is not that type. Old Labour has always gone for him, Neil Kinnock trampled on him when he became an MP, the media never leaves him alone. Now he has the Dome." Soon we will have it, too. In 744 days' time, to be precise.