with Tom Smith

We are all exhorted by the government to be part of Cool Britannia. By the year 2000 each of us should be a walking advertisement for all that is perceived to be modern and exciting in the United Kingdom.

Now, there's an archaic idea for you. If the press is to be believed this country of ours is anything but united. But, I digress.

Tony Blair has convened a Panel 2000 to oversee our passage into the 21st century. If he is to be believed the good, the great and the creative will direct our energies into conveying to other countries what we are.

The question I have to ask is: Why? Apparently, one billion pounds (of taxpayers' money) has been earmarked to ensure that Great Britain is to be the epitome of coolness.

The rest of the world will surely gasp, wonder and don communal sunglasses to shield itself from the glare.

Unfortunately, the thing about a glare is that it is unpleasant: it hurts to look into the sun.

What I worry about is that the rest of the world, embarrassingly, will turn away.

If we don't, they know that what youngsters in this country regard as cool usually has its genesis in the US or Continental designer labels. It is a marketing ploy engineered to generate money and usually vast amounts of it.

Coolness is not what this country is best at being.

Many governments have tried to revamp our post-colonial id. In 1945, Prime Minister Atlee sought to install a New Jerusalem.

In 1953 Winston Churchill initiated a New Elizabethan Age and in 1964 Harold Wilson saw a new Britain forged in the white heat of the technological revolution.

I don't want to live in a new Jerusalem (I could go to Israel and live in the old Jerusalem).

There was very little attractive in the old Elizabethan Age for the majority of its people (the Black Death lurked around each Tudor corner). I have to say that technology, far from drawing us closer to each other, seems to be encouraging an impersonal sort of communication.

How many of us have an on-going affair with our word processors?

In my opinion what other countries admire us for is not our coolness but our style: the two should not be confused.

Some observers, I have to say, are implying that our Prime Minister, for all his dynamism and ability, has no style. He has youth, which is attractive, and intelligence, which is necessary, but the Blair flair should not be mistaken for style.

The Queen and the Queen Mother have style, a Rolls-Royce has style (even if now it is foreign-owned), there is style in a Georgian facade, last May John Major had style.

(New Labour definitely had no style last May). Style is as indefinable as it is unmistakable.

The idea of an unelected committee directing the nation in the ways of creativity has to be akin to one former Tory Prime Minister telling us that the National Health Service was safe in her hands.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.