Never too late to . . .
THAT'S the trouble with grand projects. You take your eye off the ball for a moment and zip goes £170 million. Last month I was urging Chris Smith to call off his plan for celebrating the millennium on the contami- nated site of Greenwich gasworks, while he could still find someone else to blame. It was then costed (if that is the word) at £580 mil- lion but as I explained to him, these num- bers are elastic. Now they have mysteriously stretched again to £7 million. All this before the chaps in the décolleté trousers have even been hired. Just wait till they start putting in for treble overtime — you do want the job done for this particular millennium, don't you, squire? That Tony Blair says he wants to bring the kids, and you wouldn't want them to be disappointed. In this cause the sports promoter Mark McCormack has been hired to make his way around the nation's boardrooms, seeking sponsors. He will do well to outhustle Michael Heseltine, who wasn't even on commission — I can think of boards that succumbed to his per- suasions and would pay to be let out. Indeed, for a suitable commission I would pass their names on.
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