The agonising over the future of Brighton's West Pier has gone on for twenty-five years.

Since September, 1975, when the decaying structure became too dangerous to use, it has been a helter-skelter ride of emotional extremes for those struggling to restore it.

There has been joy and excitement whenever someone promised money and wondrous new schemes. But time after time, tears and agonising have followed as money and schemes disappeared.

No civilised person with any claim to intelligence and a love of our heritage can deny the rightness of the cause. Of course the pier should be restored.

And yet here we are, twenty-five years on, with two leaders of the campaign, John Lloyd and Bryan Spielman, now in their graves and the pier a skeletal, rotting horror sticking out of the sea.

Still we are arguing about money and how it should be spent.

If ever there was a time when everyone involved should be taken by the scruff of the neck and given a good shaking, that time is now. Too many people are pursuing too many agendas.

Along with the West Pier Trust, there is the Heritage Lottery Fund with its offer of £14.2 million, English Heritage, Brighton and Hove Council and a potential new business partner to provide the vital matching funding alongside the lottery. The Prestbury Group, which has been performing this function, has been wound up.

What is sorely needed is a powerful, international business figure - someone with the heavyweight clout of Richard Branson or the BT chairman, Sir Iain Vallance - who is capable of getting a bunch of disparate people round a boardroom table, banging their heads together and demanding action immediately.

Now is seems Stan Clark, who runs Brighton Racecourse, is being brought in. He heads the St Mowden Group, the new private sector partner replacing the Prestbury Group.

Twenty-five years is twenty five years too many. The arguing must stop.

Two years ago, I lunched in the boardroom of the Heritage Lottery Fund with the new chairman, Dr Eric Anderson.

On the wall facing me was a huge picture of the West Pier, starlings swooping over it.

Dr Anderson was delighted the fund was putting money into the restoration and the picture was the cover of the annual report that year.

I left feeling really confident that the pier had a future. Now the euphoria has gone and scepticism has returned.

Yes, a million pounds has been spent securing the underwater structure.

Yes, we can take a guided tour over it on a specially constructed walkway.

Yes, there may be money on offer to replace the Prestbury Group. And no one doubts the good will or the determination of the trust chairman, Admiral Sir Lindsay Bryson, or its chief executive, Dr Geoff Lockwood.

But I am afraid that a retired admiral and Lord Lieutenant of East Sussex and a retired university registrar do not have the heavyweight boardroom bravura I have referred to.

Without the arrival of such a figure, that dark swarm of starlings over the pier may well become an omen of doom.