Montreal hosted the 1976 Olympics. It took its taxpayers thirty years to pay off the bill for hosting them according to former Montrealer, Mark Steyn, in a piece published in the Daily Telegraph in November 2005 in which he warned Londoners of what their city could expect by way of costs for staging them in 2012.
A year after Steyn's warning , Jack Lemley, the American engineer employed to head the construction programme for the London Olympics, resigned, complaning his warnings about their rapidly spiralling costs had repeatedly been ignored by government ministers.
Early last December, the Times published an account of the first public pronouncements by Mr Lemley about the matter since he resiged which reports him as describing the financial estimates of the cost of preparing the East London site as a “swamp”, and of accusing Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell of only “wanting to hear good news”, ignoring his repeated warnings about the gross underestimate of the true costs.
Mr Lemley said ‘it was obvious from his first visit to the Olympic site that clearing up the chemical contamination would cost far more than the Government estimated’. Apart from the costs of cleaning up the heavily polluted East London site, the estimates were said t have omitted several other major items, notably, VAT and security costs.
If only Londoners re-elected him as Mayor so he could preside over their preparation, the 2012 London Olympics will show a profit in the end, said Ken Livingstone on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme the day after Tessa Jowell revealed in parliament that building costs had increased by 40 per cent even before any of the construction work had begun.
"Nothing’s a mess. Everything’s going exactly according to plan", the Mayor told the Today programme interviewer.
Apparently, the estimated costs have sky-rocketed because they now include the cost of building all the infrastructure for 35,000 to 40,000 new houses to be built in the Lea Valley after the Games.
"It would be madness to build the Olympic Games, then dig a large part of it up to put in the infrastructure”, explained the Mayor who added:
‘So we are saying to Government, and so far Government is up for this, that we should spend another £1.5 billion to put in the infrastructure that allows us to build those 35,000 to 40,000 homes in the 20 years that follows…. I'll make a prediction for you now - and providing Londoners re-elect me I'll actually be around to honour it - that these Games will make a profit.’
I don’t know about you, but I’m inclined to place greater reliance on Montreal’s past experience than the Mayor’s assurances who is not exactly noted for any past enthusiasm for or flair as an entrepreneur.
My doubts about the Mayor’s assurances were strnegthened when my eye stumbled upon an advertisement in the appointments section of yesterday’s Sunday Times. It was for a ‘six-figure package’ salaried ‘Head of Culture’ for the Olympics whose job will be ‘to deliver a Cultural Olympiad…. and shape and implement a four year cultural festival (!!!) … [to] showcase … London’s global pre-eminence as a cultural powerhouse’.
There are shades here, I think, of London’s ill-fated Millennium Dome, especially when the advertisement specifies that the Cultural Olympiad the Head of Culture is to deliver will be one designed to ‘celebrate cultural diversity and encourage participation from all communities throughout the UK and in London’.
The Head of Culture is apparently to report to a ‘Director of Culture, Ceremonies and Education’ whose own remuneration can only be guessed at.
Doubtless, the emphasis placed on social inclusion in the job description accounts for why, on the London 2012 Organising Committee, apart from someone representing the Mayor’s office and someone else clearly appointed for their financial expertise, the only Committee member not drawn from the world of sports is … Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, chair of the East London Mosque and Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain. This is a less than reassuring choice I think given his track-record. From his appointment to the Committee, I think Londoners can gauge exactly what sort of cultural diversity is to be the theme of these up-coming Olympics.