“Leaving Coe and Jowell in charge of this project was like sending Constable Dogberry to sort out Enron.”

Simon Jenkins in The Grauniad this morning proves once again why they were so right to hire him, as he puts the boot elegant brogue into Britain’s Olympic organisers, demolishing their spiralling demands for more and more public money with cold, angry logic. But he reserves his particular ire for the unelected and unaccountable members of the IOC:

[…]

These people are like pre-Reformation cardinals. Since the Olympic pope graciously allowed Britain to sponsor his latest crusade, he has heard nothing but complaints from the peasantry over the cost. It is giving his “brand” a bad name. Why cannot the British behave like the Chinese, who are coughing up $30bn for his ritual in decent silence? How dare they question gilded taps in the Olympic village or teakwood lining to executive boxes, or swansdown seats on the loos? Where is the Olympic ship, promised to carry pilgrim children (I kid you not) from Peking to London? And what of legacy? The IOC likes a legacy or two to gladden its press releases.

These are not sportsmen but Vegas-style businessmen for whom Blairite ministers have an extraordinary weakness. They move in a world of stadium designers, equipment suppliers, architects, promoters and agents. They are unaccountable to any electorate. The one thing they sell each four years is chauvinist glory, the “right” to hold the Olympic franchise for 16 days. They have already spawned an office block of 700 staff in Canary Wharf, consultants, architects, engineers and project managers. They have even brought in an outside company, CLM, to defend their costs at a reputed fee of £400m, money not for sport but to go straight into someone’s back pocket. If anyone accuses me of being a killjoy, I say too right. Somehow or other we are paying for this.

The truth is that Jowell and Coe are not up to dealing with this bunch – with Coe actually thinking the games will “make money as an investment”. Neither has passed the whelk-stall test, yet they find themselves negotiating with people who travel first class, stay at five-star hotels and expect chauffeurs to pick up bills for less than a million. Leaving Coe and Jowell in charge of this project was like sending Constable Dogberry to sort out Enron.

[…]

I sense Mr Jenkins is a little annoyed.

Has there ever been a government so in thrall to slick salesmen? At least the Tories, being sleazy salesmen themelves, knew when they were being snowed. The luminaries of New Labour not only fall for every hustle going they seem infatuated with the hustlers too (and quite often they marry them, as in the case of Ms. Jowell). You could paint this as the idealistic working class having been corrupted by contact with big money, but let’s face it, a preponderance of Labour MP’s and cabinet members are lower-middle-class, not working-class, and came up through net-curtain-land and secure jobs in local government. They are those people who that sourpuss Belloc derided as ‘the people in between’:

The Garden Party by Hilaire Belloc:

The Rich arrived in pairs
And also in Rolls Royces;
They talked of their affairs
In loud and strident voices….

The Poor arrived in Fords,
Whose features they resembled;
They laughed to see so many Lords
And Ladies all assembled.

The People in Between
Looked underdone and harassed,
And our of place and mean,
And Horribly embarrassed.

When you look at the way New Labour scramble after money and the trappings of wealth it’s clear that these feelings of social inadequacy drive a lot of what they do.

It’s because they feel so out of their depth and willing to defer to money that they fall for the most transparently bogus sales spiel every single time. What else was the Private Finance Initiative, or the many and various expensive IT disasters, orr the Biometric ID Card scheme, if not for a social-inadequacy driven credulity that makes them suckers for a posh hotel and a slick presentation? New Labour, yours for a goodiebag and a mint on the pillow.

Tony Blair is the prime example: look at the way the those US oil-boys sold him on Iraq. Like all good salesmen they softened him up first so he was ready to buy before he went, dazzled by the luxury, pomp and importance of it all and the feeling that at last, he was where he belonged, up there with the superrich and the big guys. He’d’ve agreed to anything.

Having lived in this taxpayer-funded bubble of privilege for ten years now he’s s petrified of losing it. so he’s desperate for money, as much as he can get: he knows that his Dad was only a civil servant and his wife’s from Liverpool and knows also that he won’t have any social clout at all once out of office, even should the indelible stain of Iraq be politely disregarded, which it most certainly won’t. Doors will be firmly closed to him once he leaves No.10 and his invitations will be declined with bland politeness.

He and the rapacious Cherie need money to keep those social doors open, though I’m not sure there’ll ever be enough.

It’s not just Blair though, it’s his whole cabinet. It’s axiomatic that even the most grounded MPs eventually go Westminster and lose touch with their electorate, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this, a Labour party that has drifted free of any democratic control whatsoever and off into some imaginary international wealthosphere where a billion pounds is a mere bagatelle. Remember the uproar when George Bush Senior didn’t know the price of a pint of milk? Imagine if they applied the same test to the current Labour Cabinet…

New Labour may be Thatcherites manques but I somehow doubt that even Margaret Thatcher, the most petty-bourgeois PM ever, would’ve approved of so much public money being squandered, especially not by the sort of socially unconfident dupes who’d pay 3 quid for spuds in Waitrose so that the neighbours could see the posh bags when they get out of the car.