By Mike Pearce

​I DID not intend to return so soon to the Turner Centre, but your phone calls, emails, blogs, letters and even a very pretty card mean I must.

At the dawn of the dream, 10 years ago, one of its instigators was quoted in this paper with a message for the detractors: “They will just have to put up with it, because it’s going to go ahead.”

And go ahead it has, so why are we still so cross?

In summary, you think it is ugly, in the wrong place, too expensive, over-hyped, elitist, unlikely to attract visitors and likely to become a white elephant whose costs will fester for years.

My particular grouse is the daft claim that the Turner fiasco is not being paid for by the likes of us.

We are meant to believe there is some art-savvy Santa Claus sprinkling millions down onto the great unwashed, in a game of funding pass-the-parcel worthy of Alice. Only this is not Wonderland, this is Thanet.

You won’t find anything for Turner in the Thanet council budget, squeaks a Tory member who appears to have had a Damascene conversion since the days when he, too, thought the whole thing was a nonsense.

I don’t care if the cheque’s signed off by the county council, Arts Council, or someone in Brussels. Whichever way you cut the cake, you are paying for it, I am paying for it, and we are both mighty angry.

And let’s hear no more the facile argument that if Margate didn’t get the Turner Centre it would be built elsewhere. It’s the logic used to justify buying a dodgy telly from a man in the pub because if you didn’t someone else would.

Some of you have urged me to reveal the name of the very senior council officer who referred to the nay-sayers as “a*******s”.

I shall not for two reasons. Firstly, it was a throw-away remark long ago during a wide-ranging discussion and I used it simply to illustrate the arts Mafia’s arrogance. Secondly, he is no longer with Thanet council and to unmask him would serve no purpose.

To the one reader who said it was hearsay, I can only say that I was there!

By coincidence, I was lunching last week in the same restaurant where that conversation took place.

I was with former Theatre Royal supremo Michael Wheatley-Ward, discussing his highly-

successful Sarah Thorne Theatre Club, giving me an irresistible opportunity to ask an arty type’s opinion of Turner Contemporary.

“I have been asked this many times and as a commercial chap in the arts I have to reiterate what I have put into various letters to the authorities over the years with these large public spend projects,” he said.

“To be on the safe side in case ‘X’ does not work out as planned, is there, like the Millennium Dome, a ‘Plan B’?”

Or as a mate of mine once asked less eloquently: “What the hell are they going to do with the place when it all goes belly-up?”.

A valid question, but the possibility of their precious building finishing up as an Indian restaurant or DIY warehouse is probably too awful for them to contemplate.

I shall end on a positive note and suggest an “art happening” to rival shining torches out to sea, wandering round a swimming pool, or gawping at the incomprehensible in an empty building where we used to buy our underpants.

Let’s march down to the Turner Centre on opening day and, as one, turn our backs on it.

Why, we might even get an Arts Council grant.