The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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about the NHS, and it was never quite clear to me why Mary Poppins was at war with Voldemort. From the beginning Danny Boyle had to contend with a certain amount of political scepticism about his entire concept. He was urged to inject a bit more jingo, a bit more of the Trooping of the Colour, a bit more Kings and Queens. Someone (it might have been me) even suggested that he should stage a Cecil B DeMille mime show of all the great British military victories over the majority of the countries we had invited to London – Agincourt, the Armada, Blenheim, Balaclava, Rorke’s Drift, the Burning of Washington, you name it.
All I can say is that thank the Lord (Lord Coe, in this case) that Danny Boyle was left alone to do exactly what he wanted.
I don’t cry much – no more than the next man – but after about five minutes of his epic I was crying like a baby. It began with the rural idyll – the hedgerows and cornstooks and chaps in smocks playing some prelapsarian version of football, the livestock (real beasts) browsing contentedly in the shade of Glastonbury Tor. Then there were those gigantic black chimneys thrusting up through the innocent earth, like some filmic special effect (how did they do it?), and England had been turned into an industrial Mordor for the forging of the Rings. By the end, frankly, you were so zonked with the music and the drama that falling off your chair seemed only polite.
Children who watched that ceremony will remember for the rest of their lives the story it told, simple but essentially right: the rise of Britain, from an agricultural society, via an industrial revolution, to the post-industrial era of telecoms and the internet. At every stage they were informed about the contribution of British writers, musicians, scientists, poets. The show was both welcoming, in that it told the story of immigration; and it was universal, in that the narrative is also, really, the story of human beings over the last 1,000 years. It was also terrifically patriotic. So I say to all the Bufton Tuftons who huffed and puffed about leftiness, come off it, folks.
We had Winston Churchill, the Red Arrows, James Bond, the Queen jumping out of a helicopter, and it all began with the Eton Boating Song. You can’t get more misty-eyed and cummerbunded than that.
No, we didn’t spend the equivalent of our defence budget on the closing fireworks (as they seemed to have done in Beijing in 2008), but I don’t think we short-changed the world by so much as a single squib. It was an epic display of ordnance; and it was with shell-shocked expressions that we all spilled out afterwards into the VIP lounge – while the indefatigable Paul McCartney was still leading the crowd in the modern equivalent of the Ode to Joy, the la la la climax to ‘Hey Jude’. We congratulated each other reflexively, and though we didn’t say it, we all wondered, ‘What was that, hey? Was that really as good as it seemed to be? Was it?’
The following morning we were asked to show the Queen the view from the top of the ArcelorMittal Orbit, and since I was early I wandered down the path beside the Lea. Ten years ago, this had been a scene of post-industrial devastation, a wilderness of abandoned fridges and the carcases of vehicles, while the stream was a suppurating soup of sewage and battery acid.
Now it was a riparian heaven, with cornflowers and viper’s bugloss and dozens of other English wildflowers, all of them specially cropped in June so that they would bloom at the end of July. This had been prepared not just with care. It was done with love. I was standing there mooching in a poetic way when I became aware of people watching me from the bridge above.
‘Oi, Boris,’ they said, ‘great opening ceremony!’
I did my best to look modest, and as if it were nothing to do with me (which of course it wasn’t, really).
‘Fantastic!’ said other people, and the verdict seemed to be more or less the same as the crowds began to build. After we had finished up the Orbit, we took Lakshmi and Usha Mittal to the world’s largest McDonalds – which was worth it just to see the world’s richest man paying for a McFlurry with a £50 note, and the expression of disbelief on the face of the Indian-origin McDonalds woman who served him.
As we queued I tried to keep an ear out for what people were saying. They seemed to like the Park, with its Legoland atmosphere, the spongy playground surface with its multicoloured blobs. They thought the stadium looked ace, and no one was complaining that the ‘wrap’ – the dazzling white triangular streamers of plastic – had been supplied by Dow Chemicals. They liked the look of the Orbit, and expressed a general desire to go up it. No one had anything but praise for the Opening Ceremony.
I started to dare to hope that it would all be all right after all.
There is a myth now being peddled by some of the previously Olympo-sceptic media that the thing had always been fated to succeed, and that there was never the slightest danger of anything going wrong.
Well, all I can say is that is not how it felt, and that is certainly not what those same journalists were saying for years, months, weeks, days before the Games began. There is a great and famous editor of a much-loved family newspaper who is said to have approached his backbench on the eve of the Opening Ceremony, and addressed them with his usual vaginal endearment. ‘Now look here, you ****s,’ he said, ‘this thing is going to be one disaster after another. That’s how I expect you to cover it. Now I’m going on holiday.’
He spoke for a sizeable minority who hated the idea of the Olympics (and the Paralympics) since even before 2005, when London won the bid.
They hated the expense of the whole thing, and were appalled when Gordon Brown allowed the bill to rise to £9.3 bn. As one of them – an otherwise saintly fellow – put it to me: ‘Why can’t we spend the money on something useful, like nuclear missiles?’
Some of them may have disliked the fact that the decision by the IOC to award the Games to London was a considerable achievement by such Labour figures as Tony Blair, Tessa Jowell and Ken Livingstone. They couldn’t bear the thought of the city prostrating itself before the supranational sporting bureaucrats. They raved about the insult of consecrating Zil lanes in the congested streets, from which tint-windowed Olympic limousines would spray the trudging populace with sludge.
No detail was too small for their scorn. They didn’t like Locog’s jazzy geometric 2012 logo – and some conspiracy theorists claimed that it read ZION rather than 2012. They didn’t like the magenta uniforms of the volunteers, the Gamesmakers and the Team London Ambassadors.
They sneered at their trilby hats.
They winced at the unveiling of the 2012 mascots Wenlock and Mandeville, and claimed that their cyclopean visages would give the kids nightmares. Even in east London, the target of the taxpayers’ plenty, there were action groups who said that the ‘improvements’ would only pasteurise and homogenise the landscape, and who accused Locog of behaving with the insensitivity of an occupying power. It was alleged that the Pentagon was stationing Predator drones on the rooftops, and a group called ‘South London Against Missiles’ evoked the spirit of the Greenham Common women.
As the day drew nearer, the mood of the coverage 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