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:
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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.
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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’:
