LAST SATURDAY my 12-year-old daughter Lily, spontaneously and conveniently, turned and said to me: “I love London, Dad.”

We were standing in Hyde Park near the Live 8 stage, having walked there from Piccadilly past the outrageous floats and butch marching policemen on the Gay Pride parade. Five or so miles away to the south-west Venus Williams was winning Wimbledon, and two miles to the north young Harmison was surprising Australia at Lord’s.

My older daughters wouldn’t live anywhere else. Rosa was at a Finch concert at the Astoria. Don’t ask me who or what Finch are but they rocked, apparently. A fortnight earlier we’d had all an early salad together at Gabriel’s Wharf by the Oxo Tower, in the intervals between Henry IV parts I and II, then ambled back to Michael Gambon and John Wood, past the open-air books market outside the National Film Theatre.

If we’d headed in the other direction we could have walked most of the way to Greenwich without losing sight of the river. There was never a better time in the life of this city, not during my 50 years, at any rate.

For much of that time London, like all Britain’s cities, suffered from decline and a lack of love. Blitzed and battered by war, then hit by recessions, the megalopolises were tagged with the all-encompassing write-off of being “inner cities”, places full of angry black people, of immobile white people, characterised by joblessness and crime. Litter-strewn tower blocks, empty rotting factories, trolley-filled canals, dangerous pit-bull infested parks, these were what cities meant.

Enter the second great period of ruraliana, when the journalists and writers upped and left the smoke, seeking authenticity among richer white folk, bantams, paddocks and raspberries at 50p a punnet. “We did it for the children,” they told themselves. City life had never, since the Industrial Revolution, seemed so bad, so unfashionable. You made your money, and got out. Paris in the spring, Maidenhead for the rest of the year.

Things have changed, but some of the traditional dislike felt by the ruling classes for the city persists. Those apers of the gentry, the men and women of the Daily Mail, do their best to create dystopias of constant crime, transport breakdown and crazy foreigners. The best way to avoid it being to win one of their country cottages with plastic roses planted all around the door. London can’t do anything.

It’s all a dirty, fly-blown disaster. That’s the negativity one sees reflected in the early polling showing 68 per cent support for the London Olympics, lower than any other bidder’s, save New York.

The French elite — cultural and political, by contrast, has always supported and lived in Paris — most of them having run away from rural idiocy to get to the capital in the first place. You don’t find Sartre yearning for a meadow, a rectory and five chickens somewhere just outside Auch. Paris has been up for the Games for 20 years.

Eh bien, it’s a great city and I love it. But things have changed in London in the past 20 years; changed dramatically. Where we had riots we now have carnivals. Where we had decaying warehouses we now have galleries. Where we had bomb sites we have innovative housing. The parks of London are strangely well maintained and full of new art. Boats ferry art lovers down the river between the two Tates, naked kids play in the courtyard of Somerset House, while inside artlovers visit the Courtauld gallery. On Hampstead Heath, just below Parliament Hill, are the giant chair and table created by Negri.

Everywhere, previously hidden and slightly shabby glories are being rediscovered and restored. London is a city of squares and small parks, each street possessing more quirky history than entire county towns. In the area where the Games would be situated there is a magnificent river, the Lea (or, if you prefer, the Lee) — for centuries a water highway for the transport of goods into and out of London — along with its valley, full of birds and cycleways. The river lies besides some of the poorest and most diverse areas of London — Stratford, East and West Ham and Plaistow, through which small creeks run, unknown and unregarded, between the Lea and the Thames.

The population of these places, with their high concentration of recent immigrants, is much younger than the European average. It’s these young people who stand to benefit most from the coming of the Olympics. And it is them, their schools and their colleges and their youth clubs, who would — I believe — help to make the Games an incredible success.

Compared with Paris, London is now a youthful city. Compare the sedate Seine with the playful Thames. If France worries about Polish plumbers, London welcomes them, and they know it — them and Estonian electricians, Latvian lap dancers, Bulgarian bus drivers and Moldovan mime artists.

You name the language, the nationality of the Olympic team, and we will find them someone to talk to in their own language, to take them to a café or restaurant, to show them the sights.

As one of her friends told the BBC correspondent in Paris, Caroline Wyatt: “Paris? Yes, it’s beautiful. But it’s a museum, or maybe a mausoleum. It hasn’t changed in years. I prefer London. It’s dynamic and it’s vibrant.”

This is the truth. London, on the way up, has passed Paris on its way down. London is the city for the young, for the traveller, for the lover of experience. And it’s beginning to dawn on us all just what a great place it is. If you were to retake the Olympic poll, now my guess is that support for the bid would be in the 80s.

Tomorrow the 115 delegates for the meeting of the International Olympic Committee, gathered together in Singapore, will hear last-minute submissions from the five competing cities. It is reported that up to a quarter of them haven’t yet decided who to support. The most influential men in Singapore include Mario Pescante, the Italian head of the European Olympic Association, Lamine Diack, from Senegal, Mario Vazquez Rana, from Mexico, China ’s Yu Zaiqing, and Dick Pound, of Canada.

So here goes. Signor Pescante, Dick and colleagues. We know that some of you have made promises to Paris and other cities, and that you may feel an obligation given the fact that the French capital has failed with good bids before. You may very well feel that it is, in some vague way, France’s turn.

But you must base your decision on the bids now, and the way you think things will be by the time the Games are held. On that basis, if you were starting over, you’d surely vote for London. Paris in the springtime, maybe. But summer 2012 in London.

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