CAN NOBODY understand? Ken Livingstone is the London Olympics bid, warts and all. The mayor and his city are what make London different from Paris and anywhere else. Lord Coe’s special trains, police outriders and lavish hospitality are neither here nor there. London’s unique selling point is the Livingstone-style, typified by this week’s offensive spat with the London press and his own party leaders. It is a feisty, sometimes comical, often rude vulgarity. Mr Livingstone is yin to the yang of Paris’s smooth, impeccable mayor, Bernard Delanoe. His style may be anathema to the global commercialism of the International Olympics Committee, but it should appeal to the young whom Tony Blair so eagerly seeks.
The entire British Establishment is this week in a self-abasing rictus of grovel to the aforementioned IOC. A stunning £2.5 billion of public money has suddenly become available and is earmarked for the three-week festivity, money that cannot conceivably be justified or recovered. The Tories, the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, the Daily Mail, Mr Livingstone, the Queen, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all are “ for the bid”.
Lambeth Palace has doubtless ordered “bidding prayers” to be said on Sunday in churches across the land. But London is a grown-up city. It does not need to be ordered to “feel pride”. The whole week has had an echo of the birthday celebration for Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s “dear leader of matchless courage and pluck”. Britain has gone slightly potty.
I repeat, Mr Livingstone is the bid. It is his Tube that could not open on time on Wednesday and whose Jubilee Line signals keep failing. It is his traffic lights that will hold on red during the Olympics, not Lord Coe’s “rolling greens”, which can allegedly send the IOC limo-buses screaming from Stratford to the West End in 21 minutes. It is his citizens who will revolt if Olympic visitors get “VIP lanes” and free rail passes on bullet trains, while they must stand in mute exasperation on the opposite platform.
My campaign for an “alternative” Olympics may have got nowhere, but at least Mr Livingstone has given it a boost. It was meant to reverse the gigantism now bloating world sport and retrieve some sense of budgetary proportion. London should simply offer the IOC its available facilities for a summer festival of sport and culture, no more, nor less. Tubes, buses, restaurants and hotels can cope perfectly well with what is a minor addition to the normal summer tourist inflow. The IOC’s earlier objections to London transportation may have gladdened many a critical heart, but it was rubbish. London already handles more travellers than an Olympic Games every winter weekend. August would be a doddle.
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There is no need for another penny to be spent on London’s sport, were it not for the self-importance of the IOC and the venue megalomania of its minor sports committees. It was because of the latter that the Greeks nearly bankrupted themselves last year. Totalitarian China is spending more than $30 billion on the next Games. These sums are beyond all common sense. London, I hoped, was sensible enough to resist this trend and bring the cost of hosting the Games within reach of poorer cities thereafter.
This is not to be. The ballyhoo with which the IOC arrived in London this week shows that nothing has changed. It wants a glamorous, self-regarding, purpose-designed Neverland in a green zone of security. In Paris, I saw just that. The city might have sprung perfectly formed for an IOC specification. The more London defaces itself, the more lovely Paris seems. Its Metro stations are lined with works of art. Its trains and buses work. Its stadium is magnificent. Its mayor is well-behaved.
London should have offered a deliberately funky contrast. It should have offered Mr Livingstone greeting Olympic visitors the worse for wear after a rough night out. It should have had him shouting across the street: “Go home you effing foreigners . . . take the bloody Central Line to Stratford yourself . . . that’ll teach you to toady up to Hitler back in 1936!” Gun-toting police would fill the city with blaring sirens. By 2012, the mayor’s beloved high-rise towers would be scattered at random across the metropolis, their ugliness polluting every vista. The Tube would still not work. The streets would still be jammed with roadworks.
Livingstone’s Olympics would not be for wimps and that would be their selling point. Visitors would be offered a loud, pulsating rave in every basement and Europe’s cheapest drugs on every corner. Tessa Jowell’s binge drinkers would menace the streets at all hours of day and night. Anti-hunt demonstrators would disrupt the dressage. Arab competitors would be clapped in Belmarsh. Muslim fundamentalists would have the beach volleyball played in yashmaks. The Games would be the liveliest, grittiest, most youthful of all time.
Instead the Government is giving Britons a dreadful lesson in public expenditure. The sums now involved dwarf all other “lumpy” projects, such as the Dome or Wembley, and are more reminiscent of the egomaniacal splurges of a Gulf sheikh or Romanian dictator. The message to campaigners for hospitals or urban renewal is depressing. It is that stupendous sums will be released only if they can be related to transient political prestige. There is clearly no “value” in regenerating East London or improving the Tube, or it would have been done anyway. The conduits of Treasury finance appear so clogged that only the heat of passing fame can loosen them.
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By all means let the IOC visit London, incognito. By all means offer sporting venues, of which London has plenty. But massively to distort public spending to boost the self-importance of politicians and Olympics officials is wrong. Mr Livingstone’s rudeness should be treated as the authentic London bid. His is a city with attitude, of “scumbags”, danger, dirt, fun and excitement. The IOC should take it or leave it.
simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk
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