As we stood huddled at the Tower of London 15 years ago this week, coffee drawn, sandwiches quartered, John Major hailed the birth of the National Lottery. This was his big initiative, a jumble of numbers that would bring hope to millions while providing charity for the vulnerable.

“Daybreak at the Tower of London has been a pretty inauspicious time for a lot of people over the years, but not this morning,” he proclaimed. Few of us there believed the man who merged into the grey morning. I wrote that it seemed a worse idea than the cones hotline or back to basics, and far more pernicious. How could the Prime Minister extol a classless society when he was robbing the poor to pay the rich to preserve Winston Churchill’s letters.

It was a tax on the worst-off. The week that scratchcards were introduced, I was sent to a South London housing estate. I watched a line of mothers queuing up to buy a ticket for themselves and a cola for their baby’s bottle. That was their lunch, a stack of cardboard cards that they devoured on a broken bench.

The lottery seemed evil and antiquated. In 1808 its precursor was described in a parliamentary committee as “so burdensome, so vicious, so unproductive: no species of adventure is known where the chances are so great against the adventurer, and so destructive”. It was finally abolished in 1826.

Mr Major’s new lottery appeared equally unproductive. Of course it raised billions for “good causes” but the money seemed to go on saving guinea-pigs in Peru or the giant cowpat of a Dome.

Why should so few benefit from so many? At least the bankers are expected to get up at 5am for their salaries. Even some winners seemed worse off, their once predictable lives shattered by their turn of fortunes and their inability to cope with their new wealth. “It shouldn’t be you,” I wrote.

But I was wrong. It was petty and patronising to snear. Just one number spells it out — £45,570,835.50. That was the amount Les Scadding and Samantha Peachey-Scadding won last week. Les, a haulage driver, had beaten cancer and was then made redundant.

“Just think that you’re the person who has won the £45 million,” he told reporters who questioned the size of the win. “Then tell me you think it’s too much.”

Nineteen-year-old Alex Parry, the IT worker who lost her father at 4, and who shared the other £45 million, was thrilled that she could now buy a Vauxhall Corsa in Everton blue and go to university. Their wins won’t blight their lives.

Their luck was gloriously amazingly random (although the finger seems to point to Gwent with increasingly regularity). In 15 years it has become apparent that players are equally distributed among income groups. But everyone won even if they hadn’t bought a ticket. In Westminster last week, Cabinet Ministers and the Shadow Cabinet were dreaming about paying off not only the second mortgage and moat but buying their own yacht; parents at the school gate were debating whether they’d buy the pony or quad bike first; the retired were wondering whether they could still catch the Queen Mary 2’s next round-the-world cruise. We all knew exactly how we would spend it.

Mr Major understood about dreaming. He’d been thwarted as a cricketer, he had failed as a bus conductor, he appreciated the importance of escapism, the temporary joy to be found just for a few minutes in wondering exactly how much money you would give your family or which charity to imbue with your largesse. He was never so arrogant to assume that ordinary people were too irresponsible to spend £10 million or to suggest that money doesn’t make you happy. It does for the majority who struggle with bills rather than bonuses. In a recession, dreaming is even more important, which is why lottery ticket sales have surged.

Nor have we created a Hogarthian hellhole of gamblers. The number of people ruining their lives through gambling has stayed almost exactly the same, at about 280,000, between 1999 and 2007, and only 1 per cent of these play the lottery.

But I wasn’t just wrong on these counts. The lottery gave us gold in other ways, most visibly at the Beijing Olympics when lottery money helped Britain to secure its best medal haul in 100 years. It has also provided £2.2 billion for the London Games that otherwise would have come from a hike in our taxes.

The Dome, now renamed the O2 arena, must be the world’s most popular entertainment venue having sold more tickets last month that Madison Square Garden. The Tutankhamun Exhibition, Finding Nemo on Ice, Ben Hur: I’ve been to them all. Meanwhile the “good cause” distributors have become more discerning, our local village hall and library has benefited from lottery funding. The voluntary sector that the Tories so admire is in a great part now funded by lottery tickets. I don’t care that some of the money has been diverted to fill the gaps in public spending.

Out-of-hours childcare in schools, palliative care, cancer equipment, defibrillators — if I’m not going to win, I might still benefit from my ticket.

Mr Major’s idea, I now admit, was a worthy one. If the Tories get in, they should bring him back into the Government, he may have another idea up his sleeve and this time I won’t be so quick to be rude.

Times Recommends

• Care in old age: we won’t pay, the State can’t
• Viewers’ choice: our talentless Everyman
• Memo to the poor: go forth and don’t multiply