On 31 December 1999, the prime minister, Tony Blair, and Queen Elizabeth II among others attended the opening ceremony of the Millennium Dome at North Greenwich. Intended as a crowning symbol of “Cool Britannia”, the project was consumed by financial problems and accusations of political vanity.

In mid-December 1999, Blair claimed the dome would be “a triumph of confidence over cynicism, boldness over blandness, excellence over mediocrity”. He had previously described the project as a “beacon to the world”.

But the festivities on opening night itself were themselves marred by mismanagement. Some 3,000 guests, including VIPs and newspaper editors, were forced to queue for hours at Stratford station, from where they were to take the train to the dome, after an administrative error meant many tickets failed to arrive by post.

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The prime minister travelled to the dome on the newly extended Jubilee Line. It came after he set the millennium wheel (later the London Eye) in motion; there were no passengers on board, however, after last-minute checks discovered that one of the 32 passenger capsules was unsafe.

Blair told the crowds: “From us all here in Britain to people throughout the world, we wish you peace, we wish you prosperity in the new millennium.”

At the dome, images of a stony-faced Elizabeth II holding hands with Blair as he and his wife, Cherie, sang Auld Lang Syne were beamed around the globe.

In his published diaries, Alastair Campbell, the Downing Street director of communications, wrote that the royal party was clearly “p*ssed off to be there”. 

He wrote: “TB [Tony Blair] and CB [Cherie Blair] tried to get the royals going a bit once Auld Lang Syne came on, but it was pretty clear they would rather be sitting under their travelling rugs in Balmoral.

“The queen did kiss Philip and took his hand and TB’s for Auld Lang Syne, but they did not look comfortable with the whole thing. TB claimed that Philip said to him it was brilliant, but his body language did not radiate in that direction.”

Inside the vast PTFE-coated canopy, the festival was subdivided into 14 corporate-sponsored zones under three themes: “Who We Are”, “What We Do” and “Where We Live”.

At the time, Blair said the atmosphere was so good that “you just want to bottle it and keep it”.

He added: “The easy thing to do would have been to scrap [the dome] when we came to power, but I really felt that would be a terrible missed opportunity.

“Greenwich Mean Time is known throughout the world as the home of time, so I really felt it was important to do something special and, believe me, if you go there it really is.”

Privately, Blair’s position was very different.

In his memoirs, A Journey, the prime minister remembered telling Cherie: “Darling, there is only one thing I am going to thank God for tonight, and that is [millennium celebrations] only come round every thousand years.”

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BBC News described the opening of the dome, which cost £758 million, as a “flop”.

Lord Falconer, the minister responsible for the dome, apologised “to all those people, both VIPs and ordinary people, left waiting” at Stratford Station. “There were glitches round the edges but the central achievement was very impressive”, he added.

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The Dome project was originally conceived by John Major’s Conservative government – albeit as a smaller, less ambitious project.

In December 1994, heritage minister Iain Sproat outlined a plan for “landmark projects” funded by the new National Lottery. In February 1996, the Millennium Commission selected the Greenwich peninsula – a former gasworks site – over bids from Birmingham and Derby. Virginia Bottomley, the secretary of state for national heritage, argued that the project would provide a “single shared experience for the whole nation”.

Bottomley announced that the deputy prime minister, Michael Heseltine, would convene a ministerial group to lead on the project for the government.

Following the 1997 general election, Blair’s government greatly expanded the project’s scope. According to reports, the Treasury was thwarted in an attempt to scrap the scheme during a June 1997 cabinet meeting following an intervention from Peter Mandelson, minister without portfolio and New Labour linchpin.

Mandelson, dubbed the dome secretary, took charge of the project. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, had masterminded the 1951 Festival of Britain during his tenure as a senior figure in Clement Attlee’s cabinet. Morrison’s festival attracted contemporary criticism but is remembered as a resounding success.

Morrison earned the nickname “Lord Festival” for his efforts.

John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, is also said to have played a key role in persuading the cabinet to endorse the dome in 1997. Prescott reportedly argued around this time that “if we can’t make this work, we’re not much of a government”.

Blair later wrote that “Gordon [Brown] was always against [the dome].”

On 28 January 1998, Mandelson told the House of Commons that construction was “ahead of time”, that spending remained “within budget”, and that the development of the dome’s contents had “leaped ahead”. The Conservative opposition, however, sought to exploit what they saw as the government’s mismanagement of the project.

Tory MP Christopher Fraser, a member of the culture, media and sport select committee, mocked the decision to design logos before a position was reached on the dome’s contents. “Are we to believe that it is easier to organise a world cup with six or eight years’ notice than a millennium event with 2,000 years notice?”, he asked.

Francis Maude, the shadow culture secretary, said that the dream of the project had “turned sour”, accusing Mandelson of presiding over an “unbroken history of error, disorder and ridicule”.

Heseltine broke with his frontbench, hailing the festival as a “great national occasion that shows pride in our past and confidence in the future”.

In late 1998, management of the project passed to Lord Falconer, the prime minister’s former flatmate. It came after Mandelson’s resignation over the “home-a-loan” story.

The costly “white elephant” became the subject of relentless hostile media coverage. The Sun ran a campaign bluntly entitled “Dump the Dome”. The Times described attacking the Dome as “Britain’s favourite sport.”

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In the House of Commons, Peter Ainsworth, the shadow culture secretary, described Falconer as the “apogee of cronydom”. He ridiculed the confusing marketing strategy, including the “ruthless infanticide” of the so-called “Baby Dome” concept.

On 31 December, opening day, the culture secretary, Chris Smith, conceded that the project had not been “the smoothest of operations”. Ainsworth labelled Smith the “minister for fiascos.”

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In the year following its opening, the Dome became a financial drain. The project had been based on a high visitor forecast of 12 million, but only 6.5 million attended. In February 2000, figures revealed that only 344,620 people visited the Dome in January – 3% of the original yearly target.

Jennie Page, chief executive of the New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC), then resigned and was replaced by Pierre-Yves Gerbeau of Disneyland Paris. The government concluded that a “different approach and different skills” were needed to “manage the project successfully during its year of operation.”

On 21 February 2000, Conservative MP Norman Baker noted that 10 exhibits in the “Living Island Zone” were broken and that 2,000 robots in the “Mind Zone” were non-functional. “It is not a people’s dome; it is the dome of a small clique”, he said.

“The dome is all right, but it could have been so much better. It is not worth £758 million. It is not the icon that it has been talked up to be.”

Oliver Letwin argued that the dome was a symbol of a nation that had been “corrupted”. Condemning the project as an “extraordinary denial” of British culture, he said that the £750 million cost could have funded “Cambridge university in perpetuity.”

A report by the cross-party culture, media and sport select committee, published in August 2000, found the dome’s content was “interesting and rewarding, but rarely inspiring”.

The MPs added: “The content lacks a sense of cohesion; it is more of a patchwork. There is no single element to make the visitor gasp in astonishment – to provide the ‘wow’ factor that was originally sought.”

In September 2000, speaking ahead of Labour’s annual conference, Blair finally admitted to the BBC that the project had not been a “runaway success”.

He said: “It’s not been the runaway success we hoped but neither has it been the disaster that it’s portrayed in some parts…

“I think it is right we should say, look, this was not what was intended, it hasn’t worked as well as we wanted it to and we should acknowledge that.”

Addressing Labour delegates from the conference stage, Blair added: “There are things we have done that have made people angry and we should be open enough to admit it.

“The Dome. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and if I had my time again, I would have listened to those who said governments shouldn’t try to run tourist attractions.”

In November, Conservative leader William Hague denounced the dome as the result of “mismanagement and cronyism”. Speaking at prime minister’s questions, Hague declared that the story of dome – “hype, emptiness, cronyism, lack of delivery and rash promises” – would be the “last word about this government.”

Shortly after the session, the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report that described the dome as badly managed. The NAO found that visitor targets were “ambitious and inherently risky” and criticised the “unusual hybrid structure” of the NMEC.

The NAO report also cited a “failure to establish sufficiently robust financial management.”

On 13 November 2000, Ainsworth moved a motion in the commons deploring the “financial mismanagement” of the dome. He described the scheme as a “sordid tale of expediency, vanity, half-truths and evasions”.

Chris Smith responded that it was a “matter of great regret to all of us who had high hopes for the project that the original visitor target will not be met.”

He told MPs: “That has been at the root of all the dome’s problems this year. It has led to a 65% drop in visitor revenue and the consequent need for additional lottery funding.”

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The dome closed on 31 December 2000. While visitor feedback was generally positive – with 87% satisfaction – the project was widely regarded as a failure. Much of its original content was auctioned off or donated to Disney World. Paul Scally, chairman of Gillingham FC, purchased many of the fixtures and fittings for his club’s stadium.

In February 2001, Lord Falconer revealed that the empty structure was costing over £1 million per month to maintain.

The Conservative Party’s 2001 general election manifesto stated: “Tony Blair said that the Dome would be a vivid symbol of Labour’s Britain. That is exactly what it was. Step inside and you could be anywhere – it was banal, anonymous and rootless. It lacked a sense of Britain’s history or culture.”

The dome was eventually sold to a consortium. It would be transformed into The O2 Arena, becoming one of the most successful music venues in the world.

In 2006, William Hague, now the shadow foreign secretary, told Conservative Party conference: “There [the dome] stands – vast, expensive, over-hyped and empty – the perfect monument to the high hopes and pitiful delivery of New Labour.”

In his memoirs, Blair wrote: “I will remember the entry into the 21st century chiefly for two things: the Dome and the millennium bug. One should never have been, and was; the other should have been, and wasn’t…

“We all became increasingly defensive about [the dome], until we got to the stage – me, Peter Mandelson and Charlie Falconer especially – where if it had consisted of a man slapping everyone around the face with a wet fish, we would have stoutly held it to be a work of genius.

“The simple points were that in this day and age, it wasn’t really a suitable project for government, and it never quite struck a note sufficiently attuned to the millennium.”

He added: “While it was in retrospect a mistake, the hysterical trashing of the whole project was never justifiable. However, it was explicable.”