This is Not a Drill just left Germany, where there were attempts to ban it. In Frankfurt, he played the venue where Jews were imprisoned after the Kristallnacht riots and in Poland his shows were cancelled. These cries have snowballed: the US government and Keir Starmer have pointed out Waters’s antisemitism. “Sixty fucking years [of making music] and they’re trying to cancel me, and it hurts,” he says later.

Yet here he is. The anti-Waters faction complained that he dresses as an SS officer in the show — he doesn’t; it is a generic fascist uniform — that he placed a Star of David on an inflatable pig — he did, a decade ago — and that, by mentioning Anne Frank in a list of victims of tyranny, he defames her. The last is true, because Waters believes that a Jewish conspiracy overthrew Jeremy Corbyn, fixed the result of the 2019 general election, and controls Keir Starmer. It’s a variation of the conspiracy theory that killed Anne Frank.

The protest has Israeli flags and a series of Pink Floyd-related signs: “Hey Roger, Leave us Jews Alone”; “From the Dark Side of the Moon to the Wrong Side of History”. One is more pointed: “Your Daddy Didn’t Fight the Nazis for you to Desecrate the Holocaust”. Eric Waters was killed in the battle of Anzio in 1944, when Waters was five months old, and I think his interest in fascism — his parodic fascism, which he communicates with fists and leather, and sympathy for Putin and Assad — comes from this loss. To inhabit something, to impersonate it, is to control it: Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” for a 79-year-old rock star. Firing a fake machine gun while wearing a leather coat with double hammer insignia is plausibly theatre; naming Jews as players in a demonic conspiracy is deadly.

The crowd must navigate Waters’s passion and they do it in different ways. First, they must pass the protest, which angers them, because it is a rebuke, when they are having fun. When you go into dinner, you don’t want to talk to the food. Some pause and shout: “Free, free Palestine!”

There are reasonable people here: an army of bystanders to the latest eruption of antisemitism. It’s weekly now. Some of them want to reassure. They pause to say that the fascist uniform is satire, the flying Star of David pig is satire. Waters, they say, is Pink from The Wall. “He campaigns against demagoguery”: a hard sell from a stage in a massive arena. “Roger loves everyone!” “I think this is wrong, because it’s not Roger”. “He’s got nothing against Jews, you’re blowing it all out of proportion”. “It’s ironic”. Then they ease off, with saddened eyes. “I just like the songs,” pleads one man, and in he goes.

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But there are also the unreasonable. A man stops to shout: “Racist! Apartheid state! Down with Israel! You are killing Palestinians! You hate Muslims! Mass murderers, you are mass murderers, you have turned oppressors, you have forgotten about the Holocaust! You are creating a Holocaust on the Palestinians! Are only your lives important?”

An immaculately dressed man mutters, “pathetic, scum….” on passing: is it so painful to walk past a flag held by a Jew? I see him again later, saying into a telephone, “Meet me where the Israelites were protesting”. I go in, passing a woman raging at the protest, dressed as a rainbow.

Inside, in the queue, an affable man from Newcastle tells me: “I think he’s cracked. Like lots of geniuses.” He can’t say why Waters moves him. It comes from a place without words.

The show opens with a statement about the events in Germany, projected onto a screen: “Regardless of the consequences of the attacks against me, I will continue to condemn injustice and all those who perpetrate it.” This gets a moderate cheer, which will disappoint him. They are here for the music and if some of them half or wholly believe him — I’m not sure how many Corbynites can afford the O2 — for others it is only the price of entry, nodding alone as he says Fuck the Occupation, Fuck the Roman Empire, Fuck Drones. But he doesn’t know it. “If you are one of those ‘I love Pink Floyd but I don’t like Roger’s politics’ people,” says an announcer, “you might do well to fuck off to the bar.” But they don’t.

The stage is arranged as a piano bar, for intimacy and the flow of ideas. It is another of Waters’s delusions because, the following night, when a man unfurls an Israeli flag in the arena, his opinion is not suffered in “the bar”, and he is manhandled away. Tonight, though, Waters says he wants to “exchange human feelings. All of you in the O2 are in the bar with me somehow.”

Waters speaks his distress. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever tried to cancel any of you. I’ve watched other people being cancelled. I watched Jeremy Corbyn be cancelled by the Israeli lobby. That is what happened in 2019. I know you didn’t come here to listen to this,” he moans, “and I didn’t come here to tell you.” Didn’t you? “If only I didn’t have to tell you, if only these fuckers weren’t trying to cancel me, but they are, and I’m not going to let them do it. I’m fighting back.” A man screams: “I love you!” “I love you,” Waters replies, “whoever you are”, unaware that he who loves everyone loves no one.

He attacks the Tory-turned-Labour MP Christian’s Wakeford’s criticisms of him: Wakeford, whose constituency has a large Jewish community, complained about the mention of Anne Frank, the flying Star of David pig, and the “SS” uniform. “Star of David on a giant pig, blah, blah, blah,” he says. “Guess what Christian? I didn’t. Do your research you cripple!” The crowd, listening patiently, as if watching a man they admire shout at a broken Teasmade, emits a murmur of confusion. Surely this is a banned word? “You are making shit up because you’ve been told to by your masters in the Foreign Office in Tel Aviv. Because this hate — hate, this hate! — is being organised from Israel. Alright..” And he slumps a little, “The Bar…” And he sings.

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This is Not a Drill is explicit: Waters believes that the world is controlled by a cabal that includes Bush, and Obama, and Clinton and Biden (“war criminal — just getting started”), and arms companies and Israel, but not Putin, who appears briefly next to a sign that reads “Believe”. The music is better than the politics; others helped him make the music, and the politics are all his own. The music is incredible: Waters has finessed his screaming over 60 years.

We are, for our entertainment, told, in song and image, that we are dolls, robots, babies, sheep: that we are inhuman, and at the mercy of a demagogue that Waters inhabits but in no way is. “It’s theatre, darling!”

I goggle when the Fuck the Patriarchy sign blooms on the screen because Waters’s feminism is not convincing. The two women on stage are young and lovely, though the men are not. The bass guitarist and the saxophonist get long solos; the women do not. Waters squeezes himself past them, saying, “Shanay, squeeze, Amanda, squeeze”; he’s a rocker Benny Hill. The following night, he will insult Polly Samson, the wife of his former bandmate Dave Gilmour, who called him an antisemite on Twitter in February. “Imagine waking up to that every morning,” he says, and I am reminded he has been married five times. The next morning, Gilmour posts a picture of Samson, saying he is glad to wake up with her. Waters has a gift for making people sing to his tunes. He does it here.

By the end, the crowd is sated on Waters’s combination of exultation and grief. Most of them stand by Waters because they love the music of Pink Floyd. It’s good show, but not a good excuse.

Its innards are amusement infrastructure, geared to big-ticket events: Simply Red, Beyoncé, Strictly Come Dancing Live. But before this incarnation, it was a key battleground in a culture war that first took shape during the Second World War, erupted into factional conflict during the Thatcher years, and has since devolved into scattered, bitter insurgency: the contest over the proper relationship between artists and the state.

The Dome’s tattered corpse is a fitting symbol for a Britain scrabbling for public meaning, amid the wreckage of the cultural settlement that succeeded the last Gilded Age — a settlement now well and truly defunct. But two days after Storm Eunice flayed it came the news of a different structure, yet to be born: the first stately home to be built in England for over a century.

Taken together, the Dome’s death and this putative grand mansion tell the story both of Britain’s tragic experiment with artistic egalitarianism, and also of what came before and may yet succeed it.

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In 1900, England’s richest 1% held some 75% of the country’s wealth. Among many other things, one effect of this disparity was that if you wanted money for the arts, you needed a rich patron. It was war that took the gilt off that age, in a grand conflagration of people and resources that decimated the old imperial aristocracy, even as it minted wealthy new wartime industrialists.

Two world wars also shredded the leisure — and a great deal of the wealth disparity — that shored up the old funding model for cultural life. Fearful for the nation’s artistic future, Britain’s wartime government founded CEMA, the Commission for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. Bureaucracies, once created, are tenacious. CEMA was re-founded in 1946 by Royal Charter as the Arts Council — the body that would, five decades on, direct much of the funding for the Millennium Dome fiasco.

John Maynard Keynes, CEMA’s first chair, described its remit as “to encourage the best British national arts, everywhere, and to do it as far as possible by supporting others rather than by setting up state-run enterprises”. But it never quite worked like that. The Arts Council’s first notable success was, in fact, illustrative not of this principle but of the opposite: not a return to independent efflorescence of cultural life, but a new kind of state patronage modelled on wartime collectivism.

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The body was responsible for the 1951 Festival of Britain, an event intended to mark the centenary of Prince Albert’s 1851 Great Exhibition. Albert’s event was self-financing, and made a profit. In contrast, the Festival of Britain was funded by the government, and aimed to showcase all that was “modern, forward-looking and contemporary” in British culture and design, including the concrete South Bank Centre. A public unified by wartime collectivism and eager for a brighter and less bomb-filled future were enthusiastic. It’s estimated that of a then-population of 49 million, around half participated in the nationwide Festival in some way: the high point of a Keynesian social-democratic merger of state largesse and elite cultural progressivism.

Winston Churchill reportedly hated it, describing it as “three-dimensional socialist propaganda”. As soon as he decently could, following his re-election in 1951, he had the Festival’s aluminium Skylon monument demolished and turned into ashtrays: presaging the culture war that was to follow.

By the Seventies, public-sector progressivism and accompanying state largesse had percolated from elite socialist bureaucrats to a broad-based creative class funded by subsidy, increasingly radical in the wake of the hippie revolution, and determined to smash convention everywhere from (subsidised) dramaturgy for children to prostitution-themed exhibitions at the (subsidised) Institute of Contemporary Art. Under Thatcher, the Tories grew ever keener to cut this antagonistic arts counter-elite down to size.

In 1985, Norman Tebbit complained that this publicly-funded arts ecosystem was full of elitism and (more to the point, from a Tory perspective) Left-wing political bias. But the Thatcherite cure for this taxpayer-funded enemy within addressed less the enmity than the funding. Francis Maude argued in 1985 that the postwar state-subsidy model needed to be dismantled, and what creatives needed was a return to the prewar “patronage” model. As this kind of wealth now accrued less to super-rich individuals than to corporations, that meant corporate sponsorship.

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Budgets were cut, and innovations introduced to forge stronger links with business, all turbo-charged by another Tory innovation: the National Lottery. But these innovations failed to defang the progressive arts blob. For the Lottery instantly created a colossal pot of money earmarked for “good causes”, a development which in turn sprouted new cadres of (generally also progressive) arts bureaucrats tasked with dispensing it.

Paradoxically, then, the Thatcher-era attack on government-funded elitism and political bias had the opposite of the intended effect. It didn’t rein in Left-leaning political bias in the arts, or hack the cultural elite down to size. All it did was reduce direct government control over the sector, while entrenching mutual hostility between arts administrators and the Tory Party and pushing anything that showed the faintest glimmer of popular appeal out into the private sector.

Tory arts policy thus achieved less a business-driven return to conservative values in the arts than a selective reorienting of artistic radicalism. This new cultural order leaned ever harder into convention-smashing, even as it dialled class politics back to vague murmurs about the wickedness of capitalism and slapped sponsors’ logos on the flyers. So by the time Blair inherited it, the Arts Council was the perfect vehicle for the public ethos associated with his reign: progressive ideals inflected by commercial funding, aesthetics and priorities.

The man whom Thatcher called her “greatest achievement” continued the anti-elitist push begun by Maude and Tebbit, telescoping all cultural policy — high and low — into a single Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The cheerfully demotic and venal output of the resulting “creative industries” was to be marketed worldwide as “Cool Britannia”. Purportedly a bloom of new British cultural self-confidence, this in practice consisted mainly of strip-mining Britain’s cultural heritage for a content-agnostic, pro-profit anti-elitism powered by corporate “patronage”.

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It’s some distance from the Arts Council’s postwar remit, but this was far from just Blair’s fault. (He didn’t even come up with the idea to build a dome.) It simply reveals the too-great paradox at the heart of state-funded art.

How are egalitarian, taxpayer-funded government bodies tasked with responsible spending and staffed by progressives meant to preserve and nurture a cultural legacy from the age of aristocratic patronage? The Dome itself encapsulated, at a budget overrun of £204m, the fruits of that paradox. “Body”, sponsored by Boots, Roche and L’Oréal; “National Identity”, sponsored by Marks & Spencer; “Our Town Story”, sponsored by McDonald’s.

Tony Blair described the project as “Britain’s opportunity to greet the world with a celebration that is so bold, so beautiful, so inspiring that it embodies at once the spirit of confidence and adventure in Britain and the spirit of the future in the world.” And it did indeed capture the contradictory nature of budget-conscious, government-subsidised “creativity”.

Start with the sponsorship deal; work backwards to what the content should be; and always, always, choose convention-smashing or corporate vacuity over anything that smacks of aristocracy. No wonder the contradictory radical and conservative impulses of state art have driven the contemporary Arts Councils to a widely mocked statement of content-free inclusivity, which envisions a Britain where all have “access to a remarkable range of high-quality cultural experiences” even as it rebrands artists as “creative practitioners” and relativises “high-quality” and “cultural” to meaninglessness.

Storm Eunice hardly needed to flay the Dome’s sunken carcass; the bones of our erstwhile high culture have long since been picked clean. That old high culture, though, was largely the product not of government subsidy but what Aristotle called “magnificence”: “a fitting expenditure involving largeness of scale”.

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For Aristotle, it was a matter of honour for the wealthy to spend huge sums to ensure something “most beautiful and most becoming” rather than according to “how much it can be produced and how it can be produced most cheaply”. And much as the twentieth-century egalitarian in me rebels at the thought, most of what we call “heritage” today is a product of such “magnificence”: the stately homes, the sculptures, the ornamentation, orchestral music and so on.

There are many indications today that as we leave the long twentieth century, the world is returning to Gilded Age levels of economic inequality. There are many downsides to this; but it also signals our return to the kind of world in which a super-rich caste exists who can afford to be patrons on a “magnificent” scale.

Taxing the mega-rich mostly encourages them to hide their wealth elsewhere. But encouraging them to spend magnificently creates not just jobs but also beauty, as well as things that endure — such as the grand mansions and monumental architecture that form our “heritage” today.

Perhaps, then, if we are unable to prevent the re-emergence of this plutocracy, the question isn’t how to cut these giants down to size. Rather, it’s how to reorient them from the mendacious and niggardly “man-of-the-people” minimalism exemplified by the likes of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, toward the kind of magnificence able to reverberate positively through the culture.

Consider the alternatives: that we either remain mired in the Millennium Dome model, in which public artworks serve largely as a conduit for woke capital or state propaganda; or else we simply abandon public culture, and the technologies which now stream personalised content to all our individual screens become the only things we share.

If we’re doomed to a new aristocracy, should we not at least demand that they are magnificent?