There are lies, big lies, whoppers and Olympian lies

Just as our greedy, lying, lazy, expenses-fiddling MPs head off for their well-paid 8-weeks summer holidays, the Government has issued a report claiming that the 2012 Olympics came in on budget at around £9bn and (conveniently for our leaders) produced £10bn in benefits for Britain. The worry is that some people might be stupid enough to believe them.

Here are the figures for the original Olympics bid – the bid that was accepted by the International Olympics Committee (IOC) when the Games were awarded to London.

According to this, the Games should “only” have cost around £4bn and we taxpayers would “only” have to pay about £1.8bn of this. A bargain?

But once London was awarded the Games, the “budget” was quickly changed:

The total cost had suddenly more than doubled to over £9bn and the taxpayers’ share more than tripled to over £7bn. A cynic might have concluded that the original figures were just a bunch of lies cobbled together to win the Games and that those behind the figures knew all along that they were lies.

As for the supposed £10bn in benefits for Britain. Well, I seem to remember that during the Olympics, London hotels were slashing their prices in a desperate attempt to attract visitors and restaurants were unusually empty – knowing the Olympics were on, hundreds of thousands of tourists stayed away. And while Cameron and Coe and Boris Johnson were gabbing on yesterday about the tremendous benefits from their Olympics, sad old Vince Cable admitted that the whole report was a “marketing exercise” aka a load of bollocks.

Oh, and here’s a picture of the very rich Mr Coe. Having spent £9bn of our money on the London Olympics, he may well become the next head of the IOC. A cynic might conclude that the London Olympics really were a very expensive (for us) job application for him: