Watching war break out last week over London’s Olympic Games site, I was irresistibly reminded of Thomas Hardy’s
The Convergence of the Twain. It’s the poem in which Hardy implies that the
Titanic and the iceberg were destined to collide. In fact he even seems to suggest that this apparent accident was Nature’s way of teaching “vainglorious” mankind not to make boasts about such things as “unsinkable” liners.
Well, we all know of vainglorious people, even whole organisations, that have “disaster waiting to happen” written all over them. Wrapped in their own imagined infallibility, they march towards an entirely predictable comeuppance. Of course it takes a special genius to do a Blunkett, and inflict public humiliation on oneself twice in a year. But at a less elevated level, hubristic behaviour is evident all around us. Which is perhaps why so many people these days seem to share Hardy’s defeatist view of human ambition, which is basically that grandiose schemes and mighty visions are doomed to end in fiasco.
Which brings us, slightly circuitously, to the Olympics. Incurable optimist and incorrigible patriot that I am, I never doubted that London should have bid for the Games. That remains my view. But plenty of people in the media took the opposite stance. I don’t blame them. They looked at Britain’s appalling postwar tradition for letting big public building projects such as the Dome, Channel Tunnel, Jubilee Line extension, British Library, Concorde, Wembley Stadium and Scottish Parliament tumble hopelessly over budget, and sometimes decades over deadline. They looked at the longstanding social and educational problems that blight our country yet seem beyond our wit to fix. They noted Britain’s ever-shrinking global status. And they concluded (as Hardy had done about the building of the Titanic) that for Britain to bid for the Olympics would be a preposterously vainglorious act virtually guaranteed to end in a humiliating collision with a metaphorical iceberg.
And right now, I have to concede, their gloomy predictions seem bang in line with reality. The sustained sprint needed to prepare for 2012 could hardly have had a more dispiriting start than with the mad row revealed last week. One bit of Government, it seems, has approved a plan by a consortium led by London & Continental Railways for a £4 billion residential/retail development in East London, adjacent to the Olympic Village site. It would be the biggest regeneration scheme in Europe, and much needed. But another bit of Government is apparently backing a bid by the Mayor of London and his tame-poodle quango, the London Development Agency, to slap a compulsory purchase order on the same land, because they want to own all the territory round the Olympic site. Headless chickens . . . internecine warfare . . . right hand not knowing . . . the clichés are already rolling off the presses. And they are justified.
Then there’s the apparently irreversible decline of London’s transport systems. The total shutdown of the Northern Line for four days last month so that defective brakes could be repaired — a PR disaster wonderfully timed to coincide with the announcement of a £3 minimum Tube fare — confirmed what everyone suspected: that the private firms hired (on Gordon Brown’s insistence) to upgrade the Tube are about as likely to deliver world-class transport in the capital by 2012 as Pavarotti is to make the Italian gymnastics squad. At present you wouldn't back the Tube to get a darts team from Clapham to Balham, let alone 10,000 Olympic officials, 20,000 journalists and 150,000 spectators across London each day.
And that brings us to the third, and potentially most damaging, problem: the increasing disenchantment about 2012 that I detect among ordinary Londoners, even those (like me) who supported the original bid. It’s not so much the extra £250 of council tax that the average Londoner will have to pay to fund the Olympic building programme, nor the Government’s refusal to rule out an even bigger surcharge if costs overrun. Rather, it’s a growing resentment that this is one more burden placed on citizens who already pay far more than anyone else in Britain for public services — police, transport, schools, hospitals — that are demonstrably among the worst in the country.
Of course these are early days. Squabbles about land purchases may be quickly resolved, particularly if the feisty Dianne Thompson is lured from Camelot to run the main 2012 organising body and bang a few heads together. Fears about dire public transport may prove unfounded. Londoners may yet come to love paying for this mega-disruption to their city. I hope so. The last time we staged the Olympics, London was a bombsite. Food was rationed, the nation bankrupt.
Yet we made it happen. Unlike the glum cynics, I don’t think we have lost that can-do spirit. But the clock is ticking. And as it ticks, the iceberg looms ever closer — the prospect of national humiliation as the whole world watches. If that doesn’t galvanise us into action, nothing will.
My MP: A great Korea ahead of him
Up here in London NW4 our local MP, one Andrew Dismore (pronounced to rhyme with “abysmal”), continues his lonely mission to be Westminster’s last loyal Blairite. This week he reveals to the Hendon and Finchley Times the results of his “consultation exercise” on the Government’s anti-terrorism measures. And you’ll never guess what. All that kerfuffle about locking people up for 90 days without charge is clearly a storm in a media teacup, because Dismore has discovered that “almost 95 per cent” of his constituents are in favour!
Remarkable. With an approval rating like that, Blair will surely soon be running for president in North Korea. And I’m sure that Jong Kim Dismore will fit in perfectly as Head of Government Statistics.
Goodbye to all that
Finally, I can exclusively reveal that there is light at the end of the tunnel. As of this week I am no longer the father of a teenage daughter. Yes, Ms K. Morrison is 20 tomorrow. So it’s farewell to seven years of sulky silences, irresponsible drunken binges, all-day hangovers, sudden mood swings, self-pitying whinges, eating disorders, irrational persecution complexes, flaming rows and foul-mouthed tantrums.
Yes, the poor girl has had to put up with a lot from her parents. But I promise that our hormones have settled down now.
