When the medals were handed out to the campaign that won the 2012 Olympics for London, they rightly went to the likes of Seb Coe (who ran the whole show), Tony and Cherie Blair (for their late lobbying efforts in Singapore), Tessa Jowell (who was culture secretary and became Olympics minister) and David Beckham (whose presence in the final days undoubtedly helped). The Westminster Lobby was not mentioned in dispatches, but we played our part and, eleven years on, it is time to lift the lid on our sterling efforts.
It was 2005. We had flown with Blair to Singapore for the last few days of wheeler-dealing before the International Olympic Committee (IOC) made its decision. I sat on the plane with Jowell, a good friend, for a time on the way out. She told me she thought London would pull it off. She was very much in the minority on the aircraft.
Under our schedule, we would be in Singapore for the final lobbying meetings but before the vote we were due to fly off to Gleneagles in Scotland, where Blair was chairing the G8 summit of world leaders. The sports news correspondents were already in Singapore, so the Lobby badly needed to turn this into a political story if it was to take its rightful place on the front pages.
Two days before the final vote, I went down for breakfast in our hotel in Singapore and ran into a very bright and keen press officer for the culture, media and sport department by the name of Paddy Feeny. He pointed out to me some rather unkind remarks about British and Finnish cooking by President Chirac of France that he had spotted in Libération, the left-leaning French paper, while the president was in Russia the previous weekend.
Was I interested? Yes, I was very interested. We were joined by Ben Brogan, then political editor of the Daily Mail, and we ran through the quotes together. This was the diplomatic storm we had been seeking. Chirac was due to arrive the next day. Paris was odds-on favourite to win the bid, although there was momentum behind London. What’s more, Finland had two votes in the IOC.
Not only had Chirac criticized British cuisine, he had added that you could not trust a country that turned out such bad food. As we were hours ahead of London, Ben and I decided to ‘own’ the story and try to have it wrapped up by the time our news desks arrived for the morning back home. We shared the news with our colleagues from other papers and got down to writing it.
My splash in the next day’s Times spoke of a bout of international mudslinging over the Olympics and said that an astonishing diplomatic blunder by Chirac had soured relations with the UK after it emerged that he had mocked Britain’s cooking and reputation for trustworthiness. I reported:
‘The only thing that they have ever done for European agriculture is “mad cow” disease,’ M. Chirac said of the British. ‘You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland,’ he told amused colleagues during a meeting in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on Sunday.
It was a great story and Chirac’s arrival in Singapore for what he thought would be a triumphant procession to a French victory coincided with the appearance of our stories in the first editions back home. Such news travels like lightning and as Chirac entered the famous Raffles Hotel, he was besieged with questions from reporters from all nations asking about le rosbif. It was quite hilarious but Chirac was not amused.
Years later, when Coe published his autobiography, we learnt that Cherie Blair had made good use of the revelations at a reception on the eve of the vote. Coe credited her with a ‘banshee-like’ attack on an unsuspecting president, and suggested she scared him off before he had the chance to meet any of the delegates who mattered. In Running My Life, which was serialized in The Times, Coe said she approached the president and said: ‘I hear you have been making rude comments about our food.’ He told her she should not believe everything she read but the confrontation ended with a ‘massively discomfited’ Chirac leaving.
We left for Edinburgh on a long, long flight before the final day of submissions for the 2012 bid. But we were in Gleneagles in time to watch the announcement of London’s triumph, a result that had the British press contingent cheering wildly, with some joking that it was ‘the Lobby wot won it’.
Blair himself could not bear to watch the ceremony in which London was declared the host. In a backgrounder, I described what happened and how Blair, who was supposed to be preparing for the summit, had his mind on events in Singapore. While his officials and advisers went into the hotel to watch the Olympics drama unfold on television, the Prime Minister took a walk in the grounds for the next tense hour with his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell. Mrs Blair, too, could not face the television and wandered round the hotel in her official blue Olympic shirt, waiting for someone to tell her the news.
Powell received a call from Number 10 and handed the phone to Blair. It was a switchboard operator in Downing Street, who then told Mr Blair: ‘Prime Minister, we’ve won.’ At that point, in Mr Blair’s own words, he threw his arms into the air, did a jig and embraced his chief of staff. We were to learn later from Coe just how involved Mrs Blair had been. But there can be little doubt that Tony Blair’s decision to spend two full days of his busy G8 week in Singapore helped London’s case. I don’t pretend for one moment that the Lobby’s intervention was decisive but our move to highlight Chirac’s remarks must have helped.
Coe believes the attendance of the Blairs was hugely important. Blair managed to give the IOC meeting a profile it has rarely enjoyed. Between them, he and Mrs Blair saw fifty members of the IOC. No one will know for sure whether they converted the requisite number. I wrote that by giving the Games to London, the IOC has ensured that prime ministers will ignore its future selection meetings at their peril.
Of course, London won mainly because the IOC decided it had the best case. At the time the budget for the Olympics was just over £2 billion, but a few years later it had risen to £9 billion. Nonetheless, Blair and his wife had made a big contribution and secured at least a part of his legacy. It was a triumph – but disaster, the twin impostor, was not far behind. Early next day, as the summit was opening, we heard that bombers had struck London. It was 7 July 2005.