The Millennium Dome is out of sight. Down there in Greenwich, it's a long way from being in your face, even for most Londoners. For the nation, on whose children the prime minister once said the dome should confer "memories so strong that it gives them that abiding sense of purpose and unity that stays with them through the rest of their lives", it could be on another planet. But let memory speak, before the monster goes. It has been the most particular and incontestable folly of our time. The physical distance assists the political amnesia. It's hard to find any politician who will talk about the dome now. Lord Falconer shuffles forward to mutter about an exit strategy, while Chris Smith is compelled, as a coda to the disaster the government set in train, to pour another 29m of lottery money down the Greenwich drain, the better to ensure that this exit, selling off the asset for a fraction of what was put into it, can duly happen. The announcement is as blithe as it is insulting. Otherwise, what's past is past, we're told. Time to move on. Time to talk about Tate Modern, an altogether superior monument built from the pockets of the poor who finance the lottery. The dome? Forget it.  This request I cannot meet. Somehow boredom wouldn't measure up. There was such grandeur here that slinking silently away would do an injustice to history. And history was the frame. Greenwich is the home of time, the government said. This was why   Britain had a special duty to put on a millennial event that would lead the world and startle all who came from the ends of the earth to see it. The dome would "make a statement for the whole nation," said Mr Blair. It was the way for us "to take stock of ourselves". How, by that test, do we look?  The amount of lottery money consumed on the dome is closing in on 550m. Only half the expected audience have so far been willing to pay out of their own pockets for the experience. For this financial failure, they themselves, the British and global public, are to blame. Damn the punters, they inexplicably found better things to do. So the first thing we look, as a nation, is culpable. We let our prophets down. We didn't do what we were told.  But this was because we were not properly informed. The public is one scapegoat, the media are another. Asked a few awkward questions, Michael Heseltine, who can be called the dome's first begetter, was anticipating this before the money had been spent. "It's virtually impossible," he said, "to do anything in this country of any imagination without the media trying to vilify and ruin it." He was highlighting another national defect. We are apparently credulous in overlooking a brilliant creation just because a bunch of malign journalists tell us to. Or so the minister said.  
