On the side of the Angels

Simon Jenkins has a decent dig at the crooks, shills, shysters and frauds who run FIFA and the IOC this morning; after conning the UK out of £9bn for their beanfest of Lithuanian tarts, blacked out limos and goody bags packed with Columbian marching powder, they imagined that squeezing £12bn out of the favelas of Rio would give them another go, this time with sunshine and bronzed bottoms. Back here in 2012 we cynics predicted a popular uprising against the Zil lanes, with IOC functionaries being pelted in their limos with ordure mid-pipe. It never happened - they just added half a billion to the security measures and another £250m to the publicity budget. But I'm not so sure it couldn't happen in Rio in 2016; it's therefore imperative that we do all we can to encourage the most lavish, extravagant and wasteful games ever.

After all, it may be our last chance to see crawling on hands and knees an IOC member stripped naked by an angry Brazilian crowd, his Lithuanian tart dismissed and his IOC limo jacked up on bricks while youths high on his IOC drugs-packet nick the wheels. It would be worth every penny of 2012.

Meanwhile our own crooks, shills, shysters and frauds who ran the CQC find themselves unexpectedly exposed; Cynthia Bower, Jill Finney and Anna Jefferson have been named as the scum who tried to cover up a negative report. Despite the redacted report trying to hide them by naming them as 'Mr' alphabet letters. I think it's also time that all UK public sector senior managers who are members of Common Purpose to have to declare it - as Masons do. What's the betting that at least two out of these three are CP shills?

An Elizabethan Summer

For many of us, the Olympic closing ceremony was held last night at the Royal Albert Hall. My first televised Proms was Malcolm Sargent's final valedictory appearance in 1967, and last night still owes much to Sargent's remodelling of the Proms. So we had the sea shanties, 'Britannia', Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem as usual leavened with displays of crowd enjoyment and banter that must have been familiar to the first Elizabethans at the Globe and the Rose. And everyone knew the words.

What a sad little thing is the 'Ode to Joy' when placed alongside the last night repertoire. And no-one knows the words, which are more suited to the squeak of the parish organ and the Sunday service than popular celebration. You can't goose-step to the music of Vaughan Williams, or Butterworth, or William Walton. Peter Ackroyd wrote 'If that Englishness in music can be encapsulated in words at all, those words would probably be: ostensibly familiar and commonplace, yet deep and mystical as well as lyrical, melodic, melancholic, and nostalgic yet timeless.' The best work of Vaughan Williams and his colleagues has no words, but those sung on the last night serve as some sort of proxy.

And now when the last of the priapic IOC members is swept back to LHR in his BMW limo and the last Lithuanian tart packs her bags for a winter in Tallinn, when the last inflatable nurse and orange HIV costume has been removed from the stadium we can get back to finishing-off Jubilee year. Oh, and I offer, in the spirit of the paralibrettos, that master of paralibrettics Michael Flanders, with Donald Swann of course;

What does it all mean?

The weekend papers will be taking a common meme in trying to find a wider meaning to Britain's Olympic medal success. Is this indicative of Britain's broader superiority over Germany and France? Are we punching above our weight in the world? Do the results signal a renaissance in the UK's economic fortune? Government ministers are falling over themselves to announce more compulsory sport for children, and no doubt Whitehall mandarins as I write are drafting detailed prescriptive instructions to be sent to every headteacher in the country specifying exactly how many cricket bats, tennis nets and rugby balls should be held per pupil head.

In the post-games analysis never will the Chinese saw "Success has many fathers while failure is an orphan" be more proven. Every politician in the country will be elbowing a path to be identified with the country's medal success; Cameron and Boris are locked in a furious struggle to be more photographed at weekend games events than the other, and even socialists who secretly loathe the idea of competitive sports are grinning and struggling to crowd the podium pics. Even the vile and toxic Blair may pop up in the news claiming his part in the success. The coaches, families and small-scale sponsors of our winning athletes will be trampled in the stampede of publicity-crazed politicians as the contest draws to a close. 

Charles Moore in the Telegraph this morning manages the rare feat of coming close to the answer but then veers off into cliche. "Again and again, the pattern has been that a few people take up something – kicking a bladder, whacking a ball with a stick, jumping over a pole – for fun....... Almost none of this was done by government. It was worked out by the Marylebone Cricket Club or the Marquess of Queensberry or the Royal Pigeon Racing Association, and by hundreds more ad hoc individuals and bodies."

Burke's little platoons in other words have nurtured and kept alive grass-roots sports; Alf Tupper's Greystoke Harriers Club, the little yacht clubs around the coast with programmes of Summer dinghy racing, a local group of cyclists banding together to pester the local highways department, with their fetes and bring-and-buys and sponsored parachute jumps, aided by committed families, supported by the local ironmongers or animal feed merchants.  

In the end, all Cameron's prescriptive central State diktats, and all Whitehall's volumes of detailed compulsory sports regulations will achieve nothing except a wasteful bleed of taxes. I wouldn't even be surprised if Cameron set up a new sports quango - the 'Sports Commission' perhaps -  with half a billion a year in salaries and a swank glass office in Victoria. For there is nothing, absolutely nothing, into which the central State and its political class can resist sticking their grasping little fingers.  

Exploding barbies and absconding athletes

The various national 'houses' temporarily set up in London by competing Olympic nations to showcase their home nations are certainly making an impact. The New Zealand house was unfortunately destroyed early on by an exploding barbecue, leaving the Kiwis with feathers both ruffled and singed. And now, perhaps predictably, Africa House in Kensington Gardens has closed due to unpaid bills. Heads of African Olympic committees are urgently mounting an email appeal ("Beloved Dear Sir, I am acting for the Head of the Nigerian Olympic Committee ..."). The Greeks, not to be left out, have set up The House of Hellenes in the Carlton Club, attracting large numbers of (ultimately confused and disappointed) IOC members from nearby hotels after dark and in sunglasses.

Meanwhile organisers of the closing ceremony are adjusting split-second timings for the athletes' march-past to account for a number of absconded athletes, including practically the entire Cameroon team.

Plus ca change ...

Are VIP liggers avoiding the Zil Lanes?

Yesterday, it seems, the VIP Olympics liggers preferred central London's restaurants and theatres, or maybe Bond Street's elite boutiques, or maybe just their Mayfair hotel suite with a Lithuanian tart, to attending the first day of events. Swathes of empty seats that should have been filled with smug, porky little international freeloaders swigging complimentary were embarrassing by their vacancy. I think they may also be reluctant to use the Zil Lanes; with the fear of scores of enraged Londoners held in traffic jams flinging ordure or worse at their chauffeured beamers. They've apparently been ordered to turn up today, but I bet they'll be reluctant to venture out again tomorrow morning at the start of the working week. 

Incidentally, the 'Zil Lane' tag that's now gone mainstream seems to have started here on the blogosphere when the Olympic Road Network was announced in 2009; the Mayor of London blog used it on 2nd July and it first appeared on Raedwald on 29th July 2010. It's since become so widespread that the BBC feels obliged to publish an explanation on its website ... 

Alright, it was OK

Watching the opening (well, between 9.00 and 10.00 anyway - there's only so much excitement I can take) I must reluctantly abandon curmudgeonly tendencies. It was OK. The real amusement came from the sports commentators, whom the UK media thought clearly best qualified to comment on a historical pageant. They were baffled, confused and out of their depth - there wasn't a ball in sight, the pitch wasn't marked and the performers weren't wearing numbers, which rendered them almost incoherent. But wait! what was this, right at the end? A ball! The sports commentators suddenly came alive, with a depth of insight worthy of Alan Partridge;

Now all sort of tribal dancing and sun worship. But, here's the kicker: no sound. Until a solo contralto voice sings Abide With Me. Effect is strange and powerful. In the background, a heartbeat. Starting to race. Okay. We have now crossed the line into mime. A child gives a man an imaginary spherical object. They play with it! It's wild. I am not too certain what's going on with that just yet.

Man and child stop playing with their imaginary ball and hug. They are sad. Sorry, this is the one bit so far that I haven't quite got. not saying it wasn't good though. Did it represent something to do with the third world and maybe something about the environment? Or colonialism? Not too sure what that bit was about, sorry.

Well, it was an opening ceremony of two halves, anyway. Surprised they missed that. 

The glory is that Britain is probably the only nation in the world that even in highly condensed form takes an hour to expound who we are and why. If Brazil adopts the same approach in 2016, they'll be lucky to run to five minutes; Portuguese matelots, nuts, trans-sexuals and illegal mahogany. Sorry, Brazil. And as for the English-hating Africans who commented - the Mberi brothers, one thinks - "OpeningCeremony segment supposedly showing the people who built modern Britain. But I don't see many immigrants. OK Britain, we see you flaunting your history. Where's the bit in which you invade, loot, kill and plunder?" and "Worst Olympic opening ceremony ever! Trust the Brits!" Well, I doubt yours would run to sixty seconds; near-naked people scratching in the dirt with sticks, people shooting each-other with AK47s. Sorry, Africa. 

Now I can go back to avoiding the whole thing apart from the five-minute daily medal summary.

London 2012 - Whores, drugs and corruption

Imagine the likes of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose face of public virtue hid a life of private vice in which prostitutes were hired for sex parties across the globe and where chasing hotel cleaners down a corridor with his yard waving in the wind was fair play. Now multiply him into scores of rich, powerful men in their sixties and upward, an international cosmopolitan amoral exploitative malbolge of filth that encompasses all the vice of Dante's eighth circle; pandery, seduction, flattery, taboo breach, barratry, hypocrisy, theft, fraud, peculation, trickery, perjury, impostry and schism. Now here you have the parasitic maggot-heap that clusters around international 'sport', a maggot-heap with whole floors reserved this Summer in London's top brothels International hotels and a fleet of Zil limousines with darkened windows and no doubt with little hand mirrors and safety razor blades in the seat pockets. 

Already even before the games have started the maggots from the National Olympics Committees have been selling off their non-transferable tickets to top events; I don't know why anyone is surprised. After all, they'll be sprawled in their luxury hotel suites with Lithuanian hookers and piles of Columbian marching powder when the 100m is run. And the hypocrisy of the maggots is nothing as to the hypocrisy of their hosts; whilst Newham and Tower Hamlets Councils like zealous Quakers close manky massage parlours and harass street prostitutes off the street in advance of the games, the thousand dollar spray-tanned Natashas of Mayfair and Shepherd Market with their iPhone booking systems remain untouched and preserved, inviolate sperm-dumps for the Olympic elite, who would no more think of using a heroin-scabbed £10 street whore from Plaistow than flying economy class.

The athletes will be subject to a battery of drugs tests at every stage of the competition; why not the IOC and the NOC members who come to London, the FIFA corrupt who ride around in their Zils? Do they and we both condone and accept so easily their private vice? And what of the sexual exploitation of young athletes by befouled satyrs? Lavrenti Beria was not unique in using his position to 'audition' young gymnasts for places in the national team, you wouldn't let many of the international sports maggots near your own children, yet we pretend they're fit persons to lead international sport?

Olympic Shambles

An excellent piece in Vanity Fair on the Olympic shambles, greed, corruption and manipulation;

Repeatedly, I.O.C. members were found to be accepting bribes from cities wanting to host the Olympic Games. Amsterdam’s bid committee for the 1992 Games allegedly procured prostitutes for two I.O.C. members. The Atlanta 1996 committee doled out invitations to the Oscars, “free” shopping sprees, and lavish vacations by chartered jet for members. The Salt Lake City 2002 committee bought a violin for one member, gave $320,000 to another, and obtained immense amounts of Viagra for two more. Salt Lake City also paid $17,000 worth of tuition bills at the University of Southern Mississippi for the son of a Sudanese general, Zein El Abdin M.A. Abdel Gadir, an I.O.C. member, and sent a $1,000-a-month stipend to a bank account in London for the general’s daughter—who does not exist but whose name appears to be an abbreviation of the general’s own. Just before his expulsion from the I.O.C., General Gadir said, “It never occurred to me that there was the slightest link between this ... and the bidding of Salt Lake.”

Flawed Olympic missile strategy

During the Nazi V1 offensive, British Intelligence did an excellent job of feeding false information on the location of V1 hits back to Germany; in essence, large numbers of hits were reported in areas to the north of London. The Nazis subsequently adjusted the drip-feed engines to cut out earlier, to hit central London, and thus in reality most V1s fell to the south of central London on low-rise residential districts that could afford to take hits, rather than on our most important civic and religious structures. It was one of the hard decisions that wartime governments have to take. 

This pusilanimous government's docile pandering to every whim of the grossly corrupt and self-important Olympic shambles is now to include the siting of batteries of Rapier missiles at elevated locations in East and South London. The Rapier is an anti-aircraft missile, and contrary to some MSM reports, will not shoot down other incoming missiles such as the sort of home-made rockets perfected by Hamas in Gaza. But it will shoot down, say, a hijacked aircraft coming in from the West. 

Now if there's one large area of London that can take crashing aircraft it's the ghastly and meretricious 'Olympic Park' in East London; the thought of shooting down an aircraft over central London in order to preserve a cabal of worthless IOC Olympic D-listers and their Lithuanian tarts to the East defies rational belief.

Let's rather site our Rapier batteries in central London, and let the crashing aircraft fall plumb on the new Olympic stadium, the Zil park, the VIP 'cocaine' suites and the brown-envelope lounges; all of these will be missed not a whit, but a 747 falling on the Abbey would be an irreplaceable loss.

2012 visitors *will* be infected with MDR TB in London

There are not a few Public Health specialists - mainly level headed Port Health Officers and the like - who shake their heads in despair at the decision to locate the 2012 Olympics smack in the middle of Europe's highest concentration of multi drug resistant TB infection, in East London. It's like siting a cup-final game in the middle of a Cholera epidemic. Newham has a TB infection rate twice that of India, and ahead of Russia, where public health systems have all but collapsed; TB is currently killing 500 people a year in the UK, and new infections in London are reaching epidemic proportions.

Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney between them account for nearly 40% of the UK's MDR TB cases, concentrated in the immigrant populations from sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. Many have developed drug resistance, and many are beyond the reach of conventional medical services. The UK government's refusal to implement entry port x-ray screening of new immigrants from high risk areas has meant that thousands of disease-bombs are alive and ticking in East London in the middle of the 2012 area. Add cultural behaviour among the risk groups such as frequent public spitting - guaranteed to spread the bacillus widely to Olympic visitors - and you reach a risk level that makes even me avoid public transport in East London.

World TB experts are meeting in London next week specifically to discuss the risk of the Olympics in East London spreading MDR TB to parts of the world where it is currently absent; the risk is not from Olympic visitors carrying the disease - foreign visitors to the games will generally be affluent and healthy, at least when they arrive - but the risk of these visitors becoming infected whilst here.

London Transport are unable even to eradicate endemic bed-bug infestation from tube trains that run in East London, so there's no way that thousands of TB carriers can be identified and isolated in time. It's one thing to give Hans and Lotte a nasty beg-bug rash, another to leave them requiring hospitalisation for TB. But be in no doubt, statistically the infection rates mean that it's inevitable that some 2012 visitors will leave with a MDR TB infection. Welcome to London!

LOCOG Crass Cultural Illiteracy

So you're organising a truly international event that will attract tens of thousands of foreign visitors and training volunteers to provide visitor hosting services. Who do you get to train them? Why, a bigoted, blinkered, small-minded, moronic, untravelled, deeply ignorant, vacuous, addle-brained, culturally illiterate fathead of course. 

'a huge diversity of gay couples at the Olympics'

Part of the training package includes the question 'You're at the Olympic stadium, volunteering at the London Games. Someone complains to you that two men are holding hands. It is making them feel very uncomfortable. What do you do?' The correct answer according to LOCOG is 'explain that there is huge diversity (sic) of people at the London 2012 Games, which includes gay, lesbian and bisexual couples'

My Malaysian businessman mates, aggressively heterosexual, used to cause me some embarrassment  when they reached for my hand to hold on the street. It was, and is, of course a huge gesture of trust and friendship for which I am deeply honoured. Male hand holding is culturally extremely common not only in Asia but in Africa and particularly amongst Arabs. I suspect that not a few Wahhibi moslems will be deeply insulted this morning at being officially designated gay by LOCOG. 

If this kind of unpardonable gaffe is a foretaste of the organisational disaster to come, I shall be laughing my nadgers off this Summer. Locog chief executive Paul Deighton received a total package of £699,998 in 2010-11, including a £220,125 bonus. His chairman Lord Coe was paid £357,000. Calling the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia queer? Priceless.

Olympic abuse

I've no idea who the winners will be from the tacky events of this Summer, but it's fairly clear the poor folk who live in the East End will get scant benefit. Firstly, the promised construction jobs failed to materialise; the ODA's monitoring showed some 95% of building work went to workers from outside the area. Then they were advised that their road network would be reserved for bent FIFA officials in Mercedes limos with blacked-out windows to race to their west end hotels with a Lithuanian tart and a heap of cocaine each. Then they were advised they wouldn't be able to use the public transport system, either; priority would be given to games visitors, but never mind, they'd get shedloads of free tickets. When in recent weeks the free tickets turned out to be a miserly allocation of third-class seats to the women's ping-pong quarter-finals you'd have thought their lot couldn't get any worse.

One of the compensations they were promised in return for their roads being turned into Zil lanes and the tube becoming unusable was a spanking new park on their doorstep; if they had to stay at home, at least they could get out into the fresh air. News today that sitting in the park will cost them £10 a go must surely put the cherry on the cake. You'd need a heart of stone ...

Oh dear what a shame - Olympic tickets all gone

Lawks a mercy! Oh my ears and whiskers. It seems the UK's complete allocation of Olympics tickets has ended, and no more are available. And there was me all agog to see the women's 400m weightlifting and the high-board cycling hurdles. I was actually looking forward to having my can of Pepsi confiscated and my Nike T-Shirt  duct-taped by the ODA's boot boys at the gate, quite happy to be held in a side road for hours in the August heat as the Zil Lane is kept free for some chiselling crook of an IOC official to sweep through, more than satisfied that all the 'Ind Coope' and 'Courage' gable walls in London would be replaced with Heineken ads. Still, there are compensations. The estimated 10,000 Lithuanian tarts setting up shop in East London for the event are keeping rents high and no doubt East Londoners are enjoying the benefits of the acclimatisation period and discount training events. 

A hoppy conundrum for the Olympics Boot Boys

I wrote some time ago of the draconian powers being mooted for the ODA's Boot Boys, a private army of 'enforcers' who are being empowered in regulations made under the Olympics Act to tear down, cover up, confiscate, exclude and hide any advertising or message within the Olympics Zones that challenges the official sponsors. Olympics sponsors have sole right to display their brands and logos within the zones, and the government are making sure the Boot Boys have powers to prevent any 'ambush marketing' by competing brands trying to sneak into camera views of the VIP convoys streaking down the Zil lanes and suchlike. 


The appointment of Heineken as Official Beer Sponsor will give the Boot Boys a hoppy conundrum. You see, across the whole of East London the local breweries used to proclaim their houses from afar by the prominent badging at high level of gable walls and the like. 'Take Courage' is perhaps the best known, but Fullers, Ind Coope and others still decorate East London's brickwork, as prominent as you like, and as permanent. 

I'd imagine any attempt to cover over, obscure or remove such brand advertising within the Olympic Control Zones would result in popular fury - particularly since the official beer is 'foreign'. And if they're going to be left alone, it's an ideal opportunity for Britain's brewers to, er, refresh them a bit before the games. Maybe some neon. Or flourescent paint. C'mon guys - let's give the Olympic sponsors the finger.  

Olympic paramilitary thugs to patrol streets for dissent

Pity those of us who live anywhere in London close to an Olympic venue, for under the London Olympic Games Act we're going to be subject to such crushing prohibition of freedom of speech, expression and property rights so as to make the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 look like a cakewalk.

For a start, the ODA are empowered to set up their own uniformed force of boot-boys who are empowered to act anywhere in the vicinity of a games venue or Olympic Zil route. They have also been empowered to break into your home, seize and detain you on the street and remove or destroy your property. For why? You may ask

Well, not just for the heinous offence of displaying a commercial brand other than the official Olympics sponsors. Oh No. This legislation prohibits any protest or display at all contrary to the games and the massive disruption and upheaval they will cause.

As s.19(4) states, powers may be exercised in respect of any non-commercial advertising and against announcements or notices of any kind. s.19 (5) states this will cover the distribution or provision of documents or articles, the display or projection of words, images, lights or sounds and even spoof adverts or logos of Olympics sponsors. So whether you put an anti-Olympics poster in your bedroom window, or just stand at your front door shouting at the Zil cavalcade as it races past the closed-off streets, you're liable.

For breaching the regulations, you face a fine of up to £20,000 and are also liable to pay costs - wait for it - to the ODA's private army for the trouble and expense of breaking into your house and tearing up your anti-Olympics poster.

The only saving grace is that these Olympic boot-boys will need a magistrate's warrant before smashing your front door down, but with lay JPs set to be replaced across London with State Stipes (or District Judges as they're called these days) there won't be any quarrel getting such warrants easily.

If you live outside London or Portsmouth Bournemouth Weymouth and Portland, think yourself very lucky.

NB Unlike the previous post, this one's not a joke.

Olympburo Zil Lanes - gulags for offenders?

The IOC has been one of the most corrupt organisations anywhere in the world; bribery, dash and fraud characterised the organisation under Samaranch and many critics believed it hasn't changed that much since. The IOC fat cats will be amongst tens of thousands of sponsors and their corporate hangers-on, media and, er, competitors who are set to whizz in darkened convoys around London on specially designated Olympburo Zil Lanes.

And what do I get out of this? A whacking increase in my Council Tax to pay for these bloated bent herberts to swan about on privatised roads as they count the wads of notes in their brown envelopes, massive disruption and inconvenience on a titanic scale and streets obstructed with the ten thousand poxed Lithuanian tarts it's estimated will be needed to service this IOC fartfest as they pout like Pollack to attract the trade of the five thousand Polish event stewards.

And as armed police hold the population of London back on side streets to allow the Zil convoys to race through with motorcycle outriders, sirens and lights, no doubt the eleven thousand Romanian pickpockets and bag-snatchers imported specially for the Olympics will extract a further toll from the long-suffering population and the streets of Timisoara will soon echo to the sounds of London rap ringtones.

It won't be long before Theresa May announces the construction of a special Olympic detention camp where offenders who stray into the Zil lanes can be held, or where those seized by the Olympic Logo Police for wearing clothing bearing brand names or logos other than those of the official sponsors can be held and charged with the new offence of Ambush Marketing.

A curse on all their heads.

LOCOG to buy armoured vehicles for Olympic VIPs

Not only will the fat-cats of the Olympics family have entire arterial roads and the Blackwall Tunnel closed for their cavalcades, much as politburo bosses in a column of Zils did in Soviet Moscow, but security fears over their trip through the rougher parts of South London have prompted LOCOG to buy 70 surplus UK Saxon armoured vehicles at a bargain price of about £15k each.

The Saxons, from Territorial Army stocks, have been refurbished by Witham Specialist Vehicles with suede bucket seats, surround sound systems and cocktail cabinets in the armoured bodies. Seats have been widened from the standard 14" to 23" to accommodate the larger Olympic arses, with each Saxon holding up to four fat-cats.

With a top speed of 60mph, Olympic officials are expected to be safe from irate local populations, who will be banned from leaving their own roads and held by cattle-pen barriers as the VIPs whizz past.

RPGs, anyone?

Mary Honeyball / Iain Dale - Olympic tarts

I posted a comment on Iain Dale's post that in itself responded to Mary Honeyball's post, all over the number of tarts that the 2012 Olympics will attract. Mary Honeyball quotes a Press Trust of India report that itself partially quotes This piece from the Times in March 2008, from which I took all the figures I quoted on Iain's post .... follow so far?

The interesting debate is how many people will be employed by the Olympics over the pre-games and games period. Mary Honeyball first reckoned one million, but now doubts this figure. Iain reckons 10,000. I quoted 100,000 from the 'Times' piece above. Where is the truth?

The ODA, the body building the theatre (to use a metaphor), LOCOG, the body staging the play, and the government, as the 'angels' (with our money) all say different and confusing things.

The ODA says that 4,434 are currently employed on the Olympic Park, that this will rise to a peak of 11,000 in 2010 and in all 30,000 people will have been employed on the construction phase.

Tessa Jowell told the Commons that "These include 30,000 people helping to build the Olympic Park and Olympic Village; 2,500 people directly employed on the staging of the games with a contractor work force of some 100,000". Hang on, this doesn't make sense. Does she mean 100,000 off-site jobs, in suppliers and support firms such as construction materials and plant? This seems highly improbable. Anyhow, they're not on site. That's clear.

LOCOG says "By the time of the 2012 Opening Ceremony around 100,000 people will be working on the Games - including 3,000 staff, up to 70,000 volunteers and a large number of contractors." Ah. I wonder if the 100,000 figure quoted by Tessa Jowell included 70,000 volunteers? If so, it's highly misleading.

Anyhow, it seems only 30,000 or so will be employed in building the park, with a peak of 11,000 on site. So Iain is the closest.

And as for the tarts, it may be that the Mile End Road massage parlours may have to cope by themselves. Perhaps Joe 'happy finish' Ashton, could provide some advice here.

Add another £1bn to the Olympics budget, Gordon

I'm willing to lay a tenner that by the end of next week some enterprising consultant will point out that

1) The 2012 Olympic site is on one of London's highest flood-risk areas (see map)
2) Olympic development will reduce natural drainage and ground absorbency
3) Existing drainage is completely inadequate and new drainage planned for the Olympic site will simply overwhelm current capacity.

The IOC will then seek assurances from the 2012 developers that drainage will be adequate, and the site will be protected against flooding. Of course, it will turn out not to be proof against rain such as last week's ....