Millennium Commission

The National Lottery had begun operating in Britain only in November of 1994, a novel and, to many observers, faintly disreputable mechanism for funding precisely the kind of grand civic project the Opera House represented.

The Millennium Commission, established to disperse lottery funds toward projects marking the turn of the century, holds the purse strings that Hadid's Opera House desperately needs.

And it is here in the arithmetic of grant applications and matched funding and projected running costs that the project's fate will actually be settled, though the public argument that erupts around it will be conducted almost entirely in the language of taste, nationality, and cultural fitness.

Picture the winter of 1995 in Cardiff.

That moment arrives three days before Christmas in 1995.

Picture the office again, this time in December, the city outside dressed in the half-hearted festive lights of a season nobody in the practice has had much energy to notice.

The call comes, or the letter comes, accounts differ slightly on the precise mechanism, though not on the substance, informing her that the Millennium Commission has declined to award the funding the project needs.

Without that funding, there is no opera house.

I repeat, rightly or wrongly.

So he set up the Millennium Commission in 1994 and handed responsibility for the Dome to Michael Hesseltine.

Hezza, the nearly man of the Conservative Party.

He was a kind of dashing...

He had those kind of hands, didn't he? It's the rules of the jungle.

It's survival of the fittest.

Yeah, so he was heading the Millennium Commission, but that was funded by the National Lottery.

And in this first episode, where we will talk less about the major players of the Conservative Cabinet in the 90s, so don't turn off at this point.