MEDIA STUDIES
Mandelson, not the media, ruined the Dome
STEPHEN GLOVER
The government and its supporters are blaming the media for the disaster of the Dome. Last Sunday Peter Mandelson took up the theme on Breakfast with Frost. His remarks were anticipated a couple of days earlier by the New Labour columnist David Aaronovitch in the Independent. 'What turned the Dome from a mild disappoint- ment into a disaster,' wrote Aaronovitch, `was the almost universal decision of the newspapers in this country to portray it that way. They set the agenda for the broadcast media and made it almost impossible for counter-arguments to be heard.' A similar defence was entered by Michael Grade, a Millennium Commissioner, on Radio 5. Thus New Labour tries to snatch, if not vic- tory, at least an excuse from the jaws of defeat. It was the press that did it. If only newspapers had been more open-minded, people would not have stayed away. The Dome never had a chance.
As the rewriting of history goes, this takes a lot of beating. It is perfectly true that in recent days almost all newspapers have been screaming for the head of Lord Falconer. Some of these same papers have been Dome-bashing for many months. But presumably Mr Mandelson and Mr Aaronovitch do not find it odd that the media should be exercised by maladminis- tration and incompetence. The point is that the press turned on the Dome in unison only when it became clear to a child of three that the thing was a failure. Before its opening, and immediately afterwards, many newspapers were supportive. Indeed, the same editors who are berating the govern- ment today were waxing lyrical about the Dome not so long ago. Probably the only newspaper to have been consistently and unreservedly anti-Dome is the Daily Mail for which, by way of declaring an interest, I should mention that I write a column.
In other words, the Dome-fanatic Simon Jenkins is very far from being the only fool in Christendom. One of the papers for which he writes, the London Evening Stan- dard, was a fervent supporter of the project. `We know enough about [the Dome],' ran an editorial on 22 December 1999, 'to declare confidently that it will not be a fail- ure. The building is a remarkable addition to the skyline of the capital.' By Tuesday of this week the paper had come to see things differently. The Dome was 'the great Greenwich white elephant'. Unabashed by the failure of his previous attempts at prophecy, Max Nostradamus foresaw the day when 'a cluster of skyscrapers [will] rise on the ashes of New Labour's pet project'.
The Evening Standard is very influential in London, but it is not a mass-market national tabloid. The papers that best meet that description are the Mirror and the Sun, both of which were originally cheerleaders for the Dome. Though on Wednesday of last week the Mirror thought that 'giving [the Dome] an extra £47 million is an absolute disgrace', the paper had once viewed the enterprise in an entirely different light. On 21 December 1999, it informed its readers that 'the Dome is going to be a great success, particularly with children . . . Yet as usual there is one killjoy determined to wreck all the excite- ment. Our downmarket rivals [sic] the Daily Mail sent six writers to see if they liked it. They ALL hated it. . . . If the Mail hates the Dome, you can be sure of one thing. It must be great.' In similar fashion the Sun was full of optimism. 'Two weeks to go,' it enthused on 15 December 1999, 'and it's obvious that the Dome will be a huge success . . . People will flock to visit it.' On Thursday of last week, the paper took a very different view in an apoplectic full-page leader, calling the Dome a 'wretched, stinking mess' which `should have been shut months ago'.
Well, we can all change our minds. And that is exactly my point. The Dome once had many supporters in the press. In fact they were in the majority. Even the Daily Tele- graph was muted in its criticism, declaring that 'the Dome itself is not a disaster, but it is wasteful to spend millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on something that is essentially pointless'. Of course there were discordant voices — George Walden in the Sunday Telegraph; Polly Toynbee (heroical- ly) in the Guardian; Paul Routledge in the Mirror — but they were more than balanced by the editors and columnists, particularly in the mass-market tabloids, who thought that the Dome was a good thing.
So enough of this revisionism. The media were often well-disposed towards the Dome — excessively so, in my view, given that it is ugly and pointless and so devoid of anything to do with British history that it could as eas- ily have been plonked in the middle of Rio de Janeiro. Whatever Mr Mandelson may say, the press did give the Dome a chance. It was the government that ruined it.
Peter Stothard, the editor of the Times, made a brief visit to his newspaper on Mon- day during his convalescence. His friends say he will return full time within a few months. This will be a very good thing for the Times. The paper has been edited competently by acting editor Ben Preston during Mr Stothard's absence but it lacks some difficult-to-define quality which he brought to it. Perhaps it is a sense of daring. It is very difficult for an acting editor to show much of that since he is, by definition, minding the shop, and the manager does not expect to find all the shelves rearranged on his return. Actually Mr Preston has done one signifi- cant thing, which is to abolish the diary in its existing form, but he evidently feels con- strained. The new tabloid second section needs substantial work — it is far inferior to the Guardian's G2 — but I suppose this will have to wait until Mr Stothard is back.
In a moving piece in the London Evening Standard, the paper's editor, Max Hastings, revealed that when he was editor of the Daily Telegraph he had wanted to support Michael Heseltine in the 1990 Tory leader- ship election, but knew that the paper's owner, Conrad Black, required him to back Douglas Hurd, which he duly did. It would, of course, have been unimaginable for the Daily Telegraph to side with Margaret Thatcher's assassin. But I was struck by a passage concerning Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunday Times, on page 366 of Mr Heseltine's recent autobiography. Refer- ring to the same leadership election, Mr Heseltine writes, 'Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, had personally rebuffed Rupert Murdoch's attempt to dissuade him from his determination to support me.' That's Andrew Neil.
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