darkened. In April, AA Gill informed readers of The New York Times that the whole of British society was poised to reject this alien transplant. ‘We have collectively, osmotically decided that we hate the Olympics,’ he said, while Der Spiegel’s London correspondent prophesied that the city was heading for ‘an Olympic-sized disaster. London and the Olympics are clearly not made for each other. Visitors will need determination and – most of all – patience just to reach the venues at all. As for the locals, it all can’t end soon enough.’
The trouble with that crushing verdict was that there was a time when it looked just about right. None of us, in that dodgy period, conceded any of these points – not in public. We talked confidently about ‘pre-curtain-up jitters’, and insisted that London was as well if not better prepared than any previous host city. That was true; but it was also true that there were three serious anxieties, at least in my heart. They concerned transport, security, and the weather.
Next year (2013) the London Tube network is 150 years old. It is the oldest underground network in the world, and it is rightly undergoing a vast and costly upgrade. We are putting in new trains, track and signalling while transporting millions of Londoners every day – an undertaking a bit like performing heart surgery while the patient is still playing squash. We have known for years that the upgrade of the Jubilee line – enabling an extra 30 per cent capacity – was crucial for the success of the Games. We needed to install new signalling to move that many people to the Stratford site; and yet the process of changing the system, and the teething problems of the new system, were causing repeated disasters.
Bits would fall off the bottom of the train; the system would short-circuit; the software would fail; and time after time we would end up with hundreds of people walking through the Stygian tunnels to escape. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the failures, no way of averting them.
‘Is there any way we can be sure this won’t happen during the Games?’ I remember asking, and I remember too the thrill of apprehension when I realised that the answer, frankly, was no.
Then with days to go until the Olympic ‘family’ started to descend on Heathrow (where we were worried about queues) it emerged that the Highways Agency had doubts about the fitness of the M4 at Boston Manor. Some pipe-puffing engineer had done a last minute inspection of the viaduct – and decided that it was about as robust as a freshly dunked Hobnob. It would have to be closed, they said, until surgery could be carried out.
Closed! The major artery for conveying tens of thousands of athletes, journalists, diplomats and bureaucrats from Heathrow to central London. We had seven years to check the load-bearing capacity of this blinking motorway viaduct, and we had known for seven years that this was a crucial part of the Olympic Route Network – and now they wanted to close it.
Then the buses went on strike, and demanded extra pay for the ‘extra’ duties they would have to carry out during the Games. Then the taxis went on strike, in protest at the so-called Zil Lanes. I had sympathy for the taxi drivers, because there was no doubt their lives would be disrupted by the Games, and we had done our best to help them. But I couldn’t believe they would actually try to paralyze the traffic, during an event of national importance, when the eyes of the world were on London.
I stood in my office looking down on Tower Bridge, and the gridlock that was being created by this funeral cavalcade of crawling black cabs, and I fumed and wished that we lived in some totalitarian state where we could send in the tanks and crush them like bugs. Already there were reports of delays in the West End, and we braced ourselves for complaints from the Olympic hierarchs.
Yes, it really looked as though transport was going to live up to its extensive billing, and prove to be the single biggest risk of London 2012.
Until, that is, we heard about the problem with the G4S security guards. It says much for the general shrewdness of Peter Hendy, the Transport Commissioner, that he spotted this one a long way out. Round about Christmas we were told that Locog had decided to increase the number of G4S guards to about 14,000, and Peter was instantly sceptical. ‘I don’t see how they will recruit that number,’ I remember him saying, ‘not in that time.’ And yet G4S was having none of it. It’ll be fine, they said. We could do it standing on our heads, they said. They even claimed that they could mount another simultaneous Olympics in Australia. So when it was finally revealed – with about three weeks to go – that we weren’t going to have enough staff to run the Personal Search Areas, it is fair to say that we were flabbergasted.
Day after day we would turn up to the Olympic cabinet meetings at Cobra, and hear these incredible figures from the Home Office. They were 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 short. No, they had no idea where they were. They could have joined the Foreign Legion; they could be working on Cornish lobster trawlers or serving as short-order chefs in Acapulco.
No, they had no means of getting in touch with them. No, we didn’t have their mobile phone numbers. The only hope, we were told, was to call on more military personnel.
But there was one thing that worried me more than the Tube, the traffic and the massive no-show by the security guards – and it was the one thing nobody could do a damn thing to avert. It was the rain.
Almost the whole nation had enjoyed the Diamond Jubilee. It was an extraordinary display of loyalty and gratitude to the Queen for sixty years on the throne. The main event was the great river pageant, the largest such regatta for about 300 years, and the overall impression was magnificent – hundreds of boats, of all shapes and sizes, dotted over the Thames like a modern Canaletto. But it is no use pretending that the day was 100 per cent perfect. The event would have been even more spectacular if the weather had stayed fine, and by the end of that cool June day it was very far from fine.
The crowds were still vast on both sides of the river – about a million people, the largest single collection of human beings I have ever seen with my own eyes – but by 5 pm they were getting pretty cold and soggy. When the flotilla reached Tower Bridge the rain was coming down towards us almost at 45 degrees, like biting silver darts. The band played on, and the choirs continued to sing with water running down their noses, but the cloud was so low that the fly-past had to be cancelled and the next day the headline in the Guardian (admittedly not the most fervently monarchist paper) was brutal. ‘It’s a Royal Wash Out’, the liberal-left organ declared, and the next day it was announced that the Duke – who had stood bolt upright, at the age of 90, throughout much of the proceedings – had been taken to hospital for observation.
I thought we could take just about anything on the night of the opening ceremony: a Tube failure, some traffic snarl-up, perhaps even some difficulties getting the VIPs to their seats. What I didn’t think we could shrug off – not easily – was a cold and continuous downpour.
More than four years ago it had been decided to save money and build only a truncated roof for the Olympic stadium. In the event of rain, therefore, about 30 per cent of the audience would stay dry and about 70 per cent would get more or less wet. This seemed a reasonable risk, given that London has less rainfall than Rome and that it is not raining 94 per cent of the time.
Now, however, the prognostications of the Metmen were awful. The BBC was predicting rain, but there were some who said that was too optimistic. Piers Corbyn has gained fame for his ability to outdo Met Office forecasts, apparently by studying solar activity. I became a fan of his work after he correctly foretold the very snowy and cold winter of a few years ago, and I receive his regular emails. They made blood-curdling reading. He was forecasting cataclysmic inundations on the night of July 27th, an absolute downpour complete with thunderstorm …
And lo! Now it was the morning of the first day, and the Opening Ceremony had evidently been a far bigger success than we had expected. The transport had coped, there had been no bomb scare, and above all there had been barely a drop of rain – a
