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THE NEW AGE OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING 497
that could easily have been the work of the visionary television
producer Gerry Anderson, creator of the 1960s puppet
series Thunderbirds. More importantly, one of the obstacles to
improving GCHQ was the fact that it was spread across innumerable
small buildings on two sites, at Oakley and Benhalpl
Accordingly, in September 1996 Omand began to consider a
Private Finance Initiative to provide new accommodation. He
also improved the agency's profile with a new high-level GCHQ
post in Whitehall and new London facilities in Albany Court,
across the road from its existing offices in Palmer Street. 32
The future shape of GCHQ was round - or to be more precise,
doughnut-shaped. Under Omand's new plan, by 2003 all of
GCHQ's activities were to be brought together on the Benhall
site, in a vast new circular building with an open centre. The
optimistic idea of post-Cold War peace was still in the air, and
it was thought that while the building would take all of GCHQ's
staff, by the time it was completed lower numbers might even
allow them to rent out some of the space. 33 GCHQ would actually
lease rather than buy its new quarters. When construction
began in the late 1990s it was the largest building ever initiated
by the British government, and indeed the largest construction
project then in progress in Europe. The plan included an
underground road to service the main building, and massive
basement computer halls. Above ground, it required sixteen
miles of carpet and provided more than a million square feet
of office space. There was great excitement about 'the Doughnut',
but also some trepidation. The new MI5 and SIS headquarters
had each cost more than three times their original estimated
price, largely due to computer problems, and by 1999 the
projected figures for the GCHQ building were already being
looked on with some scepticism. 34
In Britain, the advent of a new Labour government in 1997
brought further change. At the start of the 1990s a young Tony
Blair - then Shadow Employment Secretary - told an enthusiastic
GCHQ trade union rally that the first act of a Labour
government would be to restore union rights to Cheltenham. 35