Brandishing nail guns and throwing smoke bombs spewing out choking red-coloured clouds that wouldn't have looked out of place at one of the Millennium Dome's floor shows, four daring, gas-masked jewel thieves crashed through the security barrier in a yellow JCB digger.

It has taken more than 10 months for anything exciting to happen at London's Millennium Dome and even then the star performers couldn't get it right.

As a metaphor for Labour's stewardship of the Dome, this week's audacious but ultimately poorly executed multi-million-pound jewel raid couldn't have been better. As a means of getting more paying punters under the Dome's tented roof, there's already some evidence to suggest parents are bringing their children to gawp at the De Beers jewels in the Money Zone and wonder: "Is that the real 203-carat Millennium Star or the fake one?"

It's amazing that no one thought of it earlier.

It all began more than two months ago when, in true Sweeney style, detectives from Scotland Yard's Flying Squad were tipped off that an underworld gang had targeted the Millennium Star and 11 other precious jewels, worth in excess of £200 million sterling, on display at the Dome. The informant was reportedly paid for the information and although the police knew the floor plans for the Money Zone had been stolen last year - detectives insist there is no connection with Tuesday's attempted robbery - the Yard didn't know exactly when the raid was to take place.

And so a police operation involving 100 officers from the Metropolitan and Kent forces - code-named Magician - was set up in secrecy to monitor the gang's movements as they tried to pull off the biggest robbery ever seen. The gang's first attempt at stealing the jewels fell spectacularly flat. Three weeks before the raid, the officers in the Flying Squad must have been humming the tune to Michael Caine's Italian Job film where he dryly remonstrated with his fellow gang members that they were "only supposed to blow the bloody doors off".

It never would have happened to James Bond (the opening sequence of The World Is Not Enough used the setting of the Dome), but the gang's getaway speedboat, moored on the River Thames beside the Dome, wouldn't start.

Whether they were unlucky the first time round or just plain stupid, this daring attempt to steal the jewels left the police in no doubt that the gang was serious. At 9.30 a.m. on Tuesday everyone was in place in and around the Dome. In a scene that came straight out of the pages of the Bond script, the repaired getaway boat pulled up alongside the Dome and waited on the Thames. The gang members, posing as construction workers, waited with the JCB digger beside the Dome's perimeter fence. Another gang member waited on the north side of the River Thames, apparently monitoring police messages, and in Kent there were others waiting for a signal that the Millennium Star was safely in the bag.

No doubt when the film rights are sold later this year, the scene inside the Dome, before the gang arrived to steal the jewels, will feature prominently. The real jewels had been replaced with fakes. The Flying Squad and back-up officers from the armed unit SO19, some of them dressed as cleaners, hid their guns inside black bin-liners. And the cherub-faced group of schoolchildren - an essential ingredient in high-drama operations - was whisked away to watch a specially performed episode of Blackadder while the few tourists who were there stared in amazement, some of them apparently thinking life was imitating art at the Dome.

"I heard a terrible crashing noise as if there was an accident," said Mr Ozcan Ocak, who works at the Dome. "When I went out to look I saw a bulldozer outside going through the Money Zone. There were police everywhere at the time. We did not take it seriously for a moment but then the police told us to get back. It was like something out of a movie. Someone next to me even asked whether this was part of the live entertainment at the Dome."

Once inside, however, the gang seemed to have forgotten about the 4-foot-thick concrete walls surrounding the Money Zone and they were trapped. Using sledgehammers to smash the reinforced glass cases holding the jewels and £1 million in £50 notes was no use once the police had surrounded them and the entire gang were caught, as they say, red-handed.

The Sun newspaper's front-page headline the next day said it all: "We only came for De Beers"; and the scriptwriters are hard at work on the first draft of the docu/soap-for-TV Millennium Star jewel raid even before the eight men charged in connection with the raid stand trial. Whether the men were chancers or working to order for a rich Arabian businessman - just two of the theories going around this week - the Millenium-Dome-Robbery-that-nearly-was will go down in British crime folklore alongside the Brinks-Mat gold bullion robbery and the Great Train Robbery.

But who could beat the Mirror for its take on the Dome raid this week: enter a competition to win a pear-shaped diamond and the construction equipment firm JCB will deliver your prize to your front door - in a bright yellow digger?