A grand folly whose life has been brief and eventful and painful

A grand folly whose life has been brief and eventful and painful. A monument to Britain that in its sad failure, oddly, has done just what it set out to do.The Dome was conceived as a millennial project that would talk to us and the world about what it meant to be British in the year 2000 and in the years to come. Our interlocutors, through this elaborate yet echoingly empty medium, would be the Government.Significantly, it was not the project of one particular government. Labour and Tory alike wanted to have this conversation with us. Each party was beguiled by the idea that by telling us we were great, they’d really be telling us that they were great. Each party was keen to own and produce sheer feel-good factor, not by running the country fairly and well, but by franchising a tiny peninsula, square metre by square metre, then inviting us to pay up to come and gaze at the contents in passive wonder.Instead it told us quite different things, and told us all too clearly.

And if our leaders, who were so certain that this was a national conversation we had to have, still believe in the project – as they say they do – then they really ought to be listening to what this project has said to us and to them.The Dome has told us and them that style is not enough It is substance that counts. A huge empty space delineated by the design of a great architect is still a huge empty space.From the beginning, critics counselled the Government that deciding to mount an exhibition without first deciding what would be exhibited was insane. The whole point of the structure itself was straightforwardly its huge span But it was just too big. In takeover-hungry capitalist profit centres, big may, arguably, be beautiful In terms of human creativity, big is just big. The theatrical show that played in the central dead area of the Dome was the most obvious example of this – no matter how much the performers boinged and tumbled, they could not credibly fill that space.The Dome told the Government, and us, that our idea of our national identity is far too grandiose. Politicians were utterly seduced by the idea that the Dome would restore Britain as a world leader, a dominant force, to which every other nation would look in envy.

What kind of petty, jingoistic ambition is this? What sort of screwed-up nostalgia does it conjure up? And what has the Dome actually done for our international identity, except mark us as incompetent show-offs?The Dome has told us that our Government is overly ambitious, but unable to grasp detail and not good at delegation. The most annoying thing about the Dome is that there were genuinely many fabulous, interesting things to see and do there. But to get to the good stuff, one had to wade through a sea of dross – or queue for ages. The most annoying experience was to queue for ages, and then get into a zone to find it crushingly disappointing.I’m not suggesting that the experience is exactly similar to bouncing around in the world of government policy and initiative, but it often feels that way.The Dome has informed us that our Government is a bad manager, unwilling to plan on the basis of common sense, and instead more willing to trust to blind faith and the idea of its own popularity and purported charisma. When the Dome was about to open, Tony Blair was keen to stamp it with his approval. When he saw that his approval was not making a great deal of difference, he shut up. Is this conviction politics, or just inept bandwagon-jumping.

Sadly, it is quite certainly the latter.The Dome has told us that the Government thinks we are children We have in turn told the Government that we are not. Instead, rather shockingly, we have learnt just how childish our leaders can be. A project which, if successful, they would have been clamouring to take credit for, has in its failure, been the responsibility of no one actually involved in the process.We have learnt how eager the Government is to blame others for its failures. And again and again, in that failure, insults have been tossed at the general public.