Indy Channels Her Maj On The Olympics
The Queen....might also have said that it would be quite hard for her jubilee celebrations not to be "overshadowed" by a party that was meant to cost £3bn, and was now costing £9bn, and looked set to cost even more. And that she understood that the bid to host the Olympics was made at a time when the financial climate looked quite different, but that £9bn seemed like quite a lot of money to spend when there didn't seem to be much of it around.
She might have added that the extra £30m that David Cameron had recently promised for the opening ceremony was also quite a lot, and so was the extra £39m he had promised to "boost tourism", which she'd understood that the Olympics were meant to do on their own. And that while she too liked the idea that the Olympics would, as Cameron suggested, "lift Britain out of recession", the evidence showed that they wouldn't. That the Olympics had, for example, damaged tourism in Australia, and in China, and that whatever they'd done to the Greek economy, it didn't seem to have been all that good.
She might have said that she wasn't that much of an expert on public transport, and that it was no skin off her nose because she never had to sit in traffic jams anyway, but that the plans for getting an awful lot of people from one part of the city to another, which included special lanes for VIPs, which might well piss quite a lot of people off, seemed to be largely based on keeping fingers crossed. And that that double-decker bus we'd had at the opening ceremony in Beijing, with that girl from that TV talent show, didn't suggest that opening ceremonies were things we always did all that well.
But she might also have wanted to remind her Government that what the Olympics was meant to be about wasn't traffic, or security, or property prices, or shopping centres, or even making money, but human beings who had worked very, very hard to show that there was something they could do very, very well. .....