Sandbagged by the Olympians!

Damn it, I should have guessed that all this apparent shock and misery in Paris when they 'lost' the 2012 Olympics to London was all a sham. I bet the French paid the judges to award the vote to us. Who on earth would really want to host this giant monkey on the back of every taxpayer, in the face of which governments appear to be hypnotised by the glitz and the glamour so that all common sense accounting flies out of the window?

A mere eighteen months ago we were all told that the cost of the London Olympics was going to be £2.35 BILLION...a mere drop in the ocean if you say it quickly enough..but all justified for the prestige and pride it would bring to England.

Well I had my doubts even then but now Tessa Jowell, our red-hot ace on-the-ball Culture Secretary announced, with some embarrassment, in the House of Commons that the bill was now estimated at nearly £10 BILLION!! A four fold increase in eighteen months? That is ineptitude bordering on the criminal. We are now told that the cost of constructing buildings alone is around £3.5 BILLION - 50% more than the ENTIRE project was costed back in late 2005!! How can this be?



They have now added £2.7 billion in contingency costs - no contingency being included in the original estimate! Why not? Oh and another laughable element omitted from the previous account - £840 million in taxation! Well you'd think the Government would have remembered that of all things!!

Miss Jowell has stated that the Games will 'bring huge financial benefit to the whole country'. I can't see the evidence for that and on the basis of past Games, the host cities have struggled to avoid something close to bankruptcy.

But the prime issue here is the degree of cost escalation. Either the Government lied to everyone about the cost in order to secure the Games or it is financially incapable of running a whelk stall. Either I can believe.

The awful worry of course is that cost estimates have quadrupled in eighteen months when hardly a brick has been laid in preparation. The London Games are 5 years away. What the bloody hell will the cost be by then? I believe the inept and insipid Ms. Jowell should hand the entire financial management of the Olympics to a team of battle hardened financial consultants who have the power to crack the whip and make some hard choices.

And finally if it's seen that the costs are going higher and higher, as I suspect the ceiling has not yet been reached, someone who is tough enough to pull the plug on the whole damn fiasco. There are much better things we could spend ten billion pounds on!