John Quinton-Barber, a senior consultant at IPB Communications, looks back at Y2K, the Dome, sending faxes and using mobile phones for the purpose they were actually intended for... playing snake on long train rides.

Was that ten years ago?

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It was a few days before millennium eve, potentially the biggest date in New Labour’s calendar, and I was sheltering in the gallows of a Westminster pub. 

The message was from the Dome Minister Charlie Falconer’s office and I was the duty press officer for the Millennium Commission. Only on this occasion, I was off duty. But, like a fool, I was still holding the duty pager, in a pub without reception and with the first edition of the Daily Telegraph hitting the streets with another front page lead knocking the Dome…

The events that followed in those next few days, 10 years ago, are well documented.  National newspaper editors being stranded outside the Dome on New Year’s Eve with their families, political infighting, scapegoats, sackings and resignations. The Dome was in ‘brand recovery mode’ from day one.

No surprise there, then. Even if the national editors and their families had got into the Dome, the project was always on the back foot. The Times hit the nail on the head long before it opened. The Leader comment in its February 25th 1998 edition summed it up well: "attacking the Dome is Britain's favourite sport".

And I remember a brave Andrew Marr writing in the Independent: "The Dome is so hated, by so many decent and intelligent people, and has accumulated so few friends and so many hard questions, that to be on its side puts me in a tiny minority."

Despite the sniping, it was an exciting and enchanting time to be thrown into the world of Ministers without Portfolio, Cool Britannia and sitting in the Cabinet Office Press Office during the day on New Year’s Eve, wondering if and where the Y2K Bug was first going to strike and what, if any, the international implications were going to be as a result of the Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s surprise resignation (this was a time before Al-Qaeda had moved to centre stage).

... and then

I wasn’t on press office duty on that infamous night in the Dome. I was in the Dome. From Alastair Campbell’s mood shortly after he arrived with the Blairs, I was well aware of what was occurring outside with the officials (including editors and their families) left stranded in the freezing cold.

Unfortunately for me, I was covering the millennium press office desk in the Cabinet Office for the next few days that followed. The prospect of doing the Auld Lang Syne with Great Britain PLC in a white tent in Greenwich had rapidly lost its appeal.  
 
Despite the ‘national furore’ over the Dome, it was a fascinating time to be a young press officer with starry-eyed optimism, thrown into the heart of New Labour’s camp of media strategists.  

At the time, you just got on with it: weekly Government communication meetings to update Campbell’s infamous Grid; on and off-the-record briefings with national journalists, press minding the Prime Minister, visits to Stormont Northern Ireland to brief the then Secretary of State, the late Mo Mowlam, on millennium funding and being part of the Cabinet’s Office Millennium Press Unit from midday NYE 1999 to 3rd January 2000.

A troubled time for the Dome

This was a time when some of our now more established journalists who were millennium correspondents, made their mark - and have gone onto better things: Mark Henderson at The Times, Emma Simpson at the BBC and Peter Woodman at the Press Association.

And though the mobile phone was starting to become popular, its use for me then beyond making a call and sending a chunky text to someone else daft enough to have one, was limited to playing snake on long train journeys back to the north. There was little snacking on information then, compared to now, and the national media had considerably greater influence over the thoughts and views of the nation. 

If you wanted to consume the news, most people still had to buy a paper or tune into news 24 channels, or rely on Teletext (remember that?!). CD-ROM was the in-thing and social networking was about going out for a few pints with your journalist contacts and twittering face-to-face. 

How times have changed for all us in our sector. We’re all having to get savvy with pictures as well as words, from print journalists learning how to handle a handycam and us thirty-something PRs getting to grips with stuff like Google Wave through to newspaper proprietors trying to work out how to make money in the digital age. Murdoch’s most recent threats to move content from his publications off Google behind a paywall are evidence of this struggle.  

And what for Government?  Next year promises to be very interesting. Expect every parliamentary candidate to be hooked up to Twitter by next April with most of them trying to outdo each other with impressive microsites.

If the pollsters are right and Number 10 turns blue next year, the Tories won’t have inherited a millennium evening to navigate. But they will have the Olympics, and an increasingly savvy and expectant population who will be only-too-willing to exercise its new-found ability to sound off, in a range of ways. 

www.ipbcommunications.co.uk

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