AND ANOTHER THING
Once they shouted 'Groundnuts!'
Soon they will be shouting 'Dome!'
PAUL JOHNSON
Here is a moral story with contempo- rary echoes. John Strachey (1901-63) was one of the cleverest men of his time. My old boss, Kingsley Martin, used to say he had never met such an intelligent fellow. He saw clearly; he explained beautifully; he radiated ideas. But he always got things wrong. In quick succession he got mixed up with Mosley, the communists and the Left Book Club. In wartime he was PRO for Bomber Command — not a good omen either. In May 1946, Mr Attlee took a risk and made this brilliant man Minister of Food. There was nothing nice to eat in those days and even bread was rationed. Strachey conceived, or was persuaded to adopt, a grandiose plan to solve the food problem by growing immense quantities of groundnuts in East Africa, to produce nat- ural oil. The scheme was thought too big for private enterprise, but just the sort of thing a Labour government could do splen- didly. Over £30 million of public money, a colossal sum in those days, was invested. Strachey was entirely captivated by the idea, brushed aside the need for a 'pilot plan', and boasted about the vast numbers of groundnuts he would grow, and the way in which they would transform our eating habits and our balance of payments.
After four years the scheme collapsed in total ignominy. I forget whether any ground- nuts were actually grown, but if so they were found unsatisfactory, or could not be sold or made properly into oil. At all events, the cash went down the drain and Strachey's career never recovered. It was one of the best-running stories the press ever had, as fresh prodigies of mismanagement daily emerged. Then, and for many years after- wards, at any Labour party public meeting a solitary heckler could have them rolling in the aisles by simply shouting out 'Ground- nuts!' It epitomised all the waste of socialism and all the stupidity of government trying to do something best left to business.
I have an uneasy feeling that hecklers will soon be shouting 'Dome!' There are omi- nous parallels. Peter Mandelson, like Stra- chey, is a hyper-clever, personable man from an old political family. It is true he did not think up the Dome, which was the brain- child of Michael Heseltine, another bird of ill omen with a record of trying to prove gov- ernment intervention can accomplish things business wisely leaves alone. But Mandel- son has become an enthusiast, just as Stra- chey was for groundnuts. The scheme exhibits all the signs of a grandiose enter- prise sure to end in degringolade — huge sums of money pouring in, angry executives flouncing out, constant changes of plan, unprecedented outpourings of words.
I don't at all like the sound of the latest `secret': the gigantic statue of a feminist woman that visitors can get into — by which orifices, one wonders? — and I can already envisage the cartoons and jokes. It is true one should not laugh to scorn such Pyg- malionisms in advance. Who would have thought the Statue of Liberty would have won such lasting affection? Or that a mechanical monstrosity like the Eiffel Tower would have come to be the very symbol of Paris, perpetual capital of the arts? But it is worth pointing out that Eiffel was a genius; that he and his trusted assistant, Maurice Koechlin, were men of method; that they both knew exactly what they were doing and how to do it, and prepared vast numbers of precise working drawings which were com- plete before building started and made it possible to assemble the prefabricated com- ponents on site with virtually no modifica- tion. The tower took only 26 months to cre- ate from concept to finish, and there were never more than 250 workmen on site at any one time. The cost was astonishingly low. I see no genius on the Dome site; worse, there are a variety of would-be geniuses hanging around, scrabbling for publicity.
What I cannot understand is how the state ever got involved in this project. The ground- nuts plan dated from a time when the state was still held in high regard, by some at least, and when 'the gentleman in Whitehall knows best' was still a Labour watchword. We have since discovered from endless bitter experi- ences that the state does nothing well and should be involved only when there is no alternative. Let us briefly recapitulate what we have learned in our dreadful century. There are only three things the state must do, for the simple reason no one else can do them: provide external defence, maintain internal order, and operate an honest cur- 7e s past the use-by date.' rency. Of course there are countless other things the state can do, and often does do. That is fine, so long as we bear in mind that the more things the state does, the less likely it is that it will do all of them, or indeed any of them, well, or even adequately. As the roles increase, so does the likelihood that all will be performed badly and, worse still, that the three 'musts' will be neglected. Of the three, it is the third — an honest currency which is most frequently botched, and history shows that a hyperactive state always ends in inflation. I remember giving Mrs Thatcher, early on in her reign, a little lecture on these lines, and she wrote it down in the notebook she carried in her handbag.
The Dome was a dubious concept from the start, for it essentially consisted of con- structing an enormous empty building before deciding what to put in it. This went against all the principles of architecture, since Imhotep first invented it in the third millen- nium sc. He knew exactly what he was going to put into his Step Pyramid and its accom- panying buildings, and they still stand nearly 5,000 years later. He started with a need, and invented buildings to meet it. The Dome concept starts with a building and then invents a need. It makes no sense. Govern- ment should never have had anything to do with it. The project should have been carried through by private enterprise, and if private capital would not look at it, then there was clearly something wrong. When Labour came in, Tony Blair should have scrapped the scheme, or handed it over to the private sector, blaming any losses incurred on Hesel- tine and the Tories. Instead, he was inexpe- rienced enough to be frightened by the can- cellation costs, and carried it on, and Mandelson was mug enough to accept the assignment of supervising it. He is a clever fellow who has come up the hard way by making himself a master of electioneering and party organisation. He now finds himself doing the job of a public entertainer on the largest possible scale, something he knows nothing about. Where Strachey tried to grow groundnuts, he will be trying to sell tickets. He should study what happened to Strachey and, in particular, how the Beaverbrook press chopped him into tiny pieces. It is a horrible tale. But it is not too late for Mandelson to go to the PM and confess it can't be done and for Blair to flog the whole thing off for what it will fetch. Both should bear in mind the old military maxim: 'Never reinforce failure.'
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