The Millennium Commission is behaving like a bunch of amateurs.Virginia Bottomley, its Heritage Secretary and Millennium Commission chair, makes policy in soundbites. They generally have a longer shelf life, but just to make sure their politics are sound ministers appoint their friends. There have been three; that alone starts to explain how the project got into such a parlous state. Is British government so beset by short-term political calculations that it is now incapable of seeing through long and complex projects?Short-termism in Whitehall is one reason why ministers hand over problems to quangos. For at the end of the day, if Greenwich fails it will reflect a failure of our business and political leaders to muster and deliver a sense of common purpose. That is why the exhibition matters.The Greenwich affair poses an even more basic question: is anyone in charge? You can start to answer that question by counting the secretaries of state for national heritage there have been since commemorating the millennium became a declared object of public policy.

Yet it is impossible not to feel a sense of malaise: that we have lost the will and the way to mount large national projects of which we can be proud. It is a puzzle that a society which is so ready to celebrate its history so often seems mired in the expedient and short term, unable to plan and execute projects over a number of years that might stand the test of time.It is also, partly, sheer lack of managerial nous, particularly in bridging the gap between the public and private sectors in the name of communal purpose. The mismanagement that has afflicted that project may be slightly different from the unfolding debacle over Greenwich. The technical failings in the Forensic Science Service have cast an embarrassing shadow over our criminal justice system The British Library is years late and hugely over budget. Yet in the event, the British system could only deliver - even this is still in the balance - a tuppenny-ha'ppeny theme park. It has not been a good week for the signs and symbols of our national competence. It is a story of how once there was inspiring talk of giant Ferris wheels and award- winning architecture and a great event to challenge Hyde Park 1851 or at least the Festival of Britain 1951.

This is not just a lost opportunity in the making; it starts to feel like the kind of debAcle you tell your grandchildren about. Indeed, on the Greenwich peninsula its not such a simple task; first the polluted land needs to be reclaimed. Time is already running short for a project with any ambition to stand the test of time, but sods go unbroken. The plan for a national exhibition to mark Britain's passage into the twenty-first century is in danger of falling apart.