A remarkable number of pop stars and fashion designers trudged through the door of Number 10 during New Labour's first year in office.
As the Blair era draws to a controversial close, it is difficult to imagine similar delegations arriving now to sip champagne with the Prime Minister. But in the years since Vanity Fair coined the phrase 'Cool Britannia', the country's creative industries - including music, design, advertising and broadcasting - have grown rapidly. Britain's rich musical heritage, like its successful fashion designers, are often regarded as cultural assets that make only a small contribution to the national economy.
But they are wielding increasing financial clout as the country reduces its reliance on traditional sectors. 'The creative industries sit alongside manufacturing and financial services in terms of their place in the British economy,' says Shaun Woodward, the former BBC producer who was made a junior minister at the Department for Culture Media & Sport earlier this year.
These industries account for around 8 per cent of the country's economy, with a turnover of £20bn a year. The sector is Britain's third-largest employer, behind manufacturing and financial services.
Agriculture, by contrast, accounts for just 1 per cent. The creative industries employ 2 million people, up from 1.35 million a decade ago. In London, only financial institutions employ more people.
Woodward was in Cannes last week for the Mipcom conference, the annual four-day trade fair at which the world's largest TV companies buy and sell programmes. The BBC was there alongside hundreds of independent British production companies, marketing Robin Hood and other popular shows.
For the first time, the smallest British firms were housed in one corner of the Palais des Festivals in a stand set up by industry body Pact and funded by the DCMS and the DTI. 'We need to champion the talent contained in our film and TV industries. If this was a meeting of financial services companies, you would have a government minister there. Even when I ended up as producer of That's Life, which attracted 7 million viewers, it was never taken seriously, even within the BBC. That's a reflection of where TV saw itself in the Eighties. It tended to be rather introverted,' says Woodward.
Woodward talks about making expertise available for smaller firms, and ensuring schools equip students with suitable skills. Some of these ideas will be in a green paper to be published next year.
But the most useful thing the government can do is create an environment where creativity can flourish, and that means leaving the market to its own devices where possible.
The DCMS acted over public concern about the violent and sexually explicit content of video games by working with the industry to introduce a system of self-regulation. Legislation was not the preferred option, but it would have been drafted if necessary. Woodward cites the games industry as an example of how Britain can harness its creative community to establish a world-beating presence in a booming market.
Protecting the industry from over-zealous regulators is also vital, according to Woodward. That includes battling to defeat the EU's proposed changes to its 'TV without frontiers' directive, which aims to subject content broadcast over the internet to the same restrictions that govern TV channels. That has been labelled back-door censorship by internet companies and Woodward described it as 'a mad idea - about as sclerotic as the CAP'.
A government that basked in the reflected glory of musicians and designers a decade ago is now fighting to prevent Brussels from stifling the internet's creative spirit.
