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 like performing heart surgery while the patient is still playing squash. We have known for years that the upgrade of the Jubilee line enabling an extra 30 per cent capacity was crucial for the success of the Games. We needed to install new signalling to move that many people to the Stratford site; and yet the process of changing the system, and the teething problems of the new system, were causing repeated disasters.
Bits would fall off the bottom of the train; the system would short-circuit; the software would fail; and time after time we would end up with hundreds of people walking through the Stygian tunnels to escape. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the failures, no way of averting them.
Is there any way we can be sure this wont happen during the Games? I remember asking, and I remember too the thrill of apprehension when I realised that the answer, frankly, was no.
Then with days to go until the Olympic family started to descend on Heathrow (where we were worried about queues) it emerged that the Highways Agency had doubts about the fitness of the M4 at Boston Manor. Some pipe-puffing engineer had done a last minute inspection of the viaduct and decided that it was about as robust as a freshly dunked Hobnob. It would have to be closed, they said, until surgery could be carried out.
Closed! The major artery for conveying tens of thousands of athletes, journalists, diplomats and bureaucrats from Heathrow to central London. We had seven years to check the load-bearing capacity of this blinking motorway viaduct, and we had known for seven years that this was a crucial part of the Olympic Route Network and now they wanted to close it.
Then the buses went on strike, and demanded extra pay for the extra duties they would have to carry out during the Games. Then the taxis went on strike, in protest at the so-called Zil Lanes. I had sympathy for the taxi drivers, because there was no doubt their lives would be disrupted by the Games, and we had done our best to help them. But I couldnt believe they would actually try to paralyze the traffic, during an event of national importance, when the eyes of the world were on London.
I stood in my office looking down on Tower Bridge, and the gridlock that was being created by this funeral cavalcade of crawling black cabs, and I fumed and wished that we lived in some totalitarian state where we could send in the tanks and crush them like bugs. Already there were reports of delays in the West End, and we braced ourselves for complaints from the Olympic hierarchs.
Yes, it really looked as though transport was going to live up to its extensive billing, and prove to be the single biggest risk of London 2012.
Until, that is, we heard about the problem with the G4S security guards. It says much for the general shrewdness of Peter Hendy, the Transport Commissioner, that he spotted this one a long way out. Round about Christmas we were told that Locog had decided to increase the number of G4S guards to about 14,000, and Peter was instantly sceptical. I dont see how they will recruit that number, I remember him saying, not in that time. And yet G4S was having none of it. Itll be fine, they said. We could do it standing on our heads, they said. They even claimed that they could mount another simultaneous Olympics in Australia. So when it was finally revealed with about three weeks to go that we werent going to have enough staff to run the Personal Search Areas, it is fair to say that we were flabbergasted.
Day after day we would turn up to the Olympic cabinet meetings at Cobra, and hear these incredible figures from the Home Office. They were 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 short. No, they had no idea where they were. They could have joined the Foreign Legion; they could be working on Cornish lobster trawlers or serving as short-order chefs in Acapulco.
No, they had no means of getting in touch with them. No, we didnt have their mobile phone numbers. The only hope, we were told, was to call on more military personnel.
But there was one thing that worried me more than the Tube, the traffic and the massive no-show by the security guards and it was the one thing nobody could do a damn thing to avert. It was the rain.
Almost the whole nation had enjoyed the Diamond Jubilee. It was an extraordinary display of loyalty and gratitude to the Queen for sixty years on the throne. The main event was the great river pageant, the largest such regatta for about 300 years, and the overall impression was magnificent hundreds of boats, of all shapes and sizes, dotted over the Thames like a modern Canaletto. But it is no use pretending that the day was 100 per cent perfect. The event would have been even more spectacular if the weather had stayed fine, and by the end of that cool June day it was very far from fine.
The crowds were still vast on both sides of the river about a million people, the largest single collection of human beings I have ever seen with my own eyes but by 5 pm they were getting pretty cold and soggy. When the flotilla reached Tower Bridge the rain was coming down towards us almost at 45 degrees, like biting silver darts. The band played on, and the choirs continued to sing with water running down their noses, but the cloud was so low that the fly-past had to be cancelled and the next day the headline in the Guardian (admittedly not the most fervently monarchist paper) was brutal. Its a Royal Wash Out, the liberal-left organ declared, and the next day it was announced that the Duke who had stood bolt upright, at the age of 90, throughout much of the proceedings had been taken to hospital for observation.
I thought we could take just about anything on the night of the opening ceremony: a Tube failure, some traffic snarl-up, perhaps even some difficulties getting the VIPs to their seats. What I didnt think we could shrug off not easily was a cold and continuous downpour.
More than four years ago it had been decided to save money and build only a truncated roof for the Olympic stadium. In the event of rain, therefore, about 30 per cent of the audience would stay dry and about 70 per cent would get more or less wet. This seemed a reasonable risk, given that London has less rainfall than Rome and that it is not raining 94 per cent of the time.
Now, however, the prognostications of the Metmen were awful. The BBC was predicting rain, but there were some who said that was too optimistic. Piers Corbyn has gained fame for his ability to outdo Met Office forecasts, apparently by studying solar activity. I became a fan of his work after he correctly foretold the very snowy and cold winter of a few years ago, and I receive his regular emails. They made blood-curdling reading. He was forecasting cataclysmic inundations on the night of July 27th, an absolute downpour complete with thunderstorm
And lo! Now it was the morning of the first day, and the Opening Ceremony had evidently been a far bigger success than we had expected. The transport had coped, there had been no bomb scare, and above all there had been barely a drop of rain a fine Scotch mist, perhaps, about an hour before it began, no more.
And lo! Now it was the morning of the first day, and the Opening Ceremony had evidently been a far bigger success than we had expected. The transport had coped, there had been no bomb scare, and above all there had been barely a drop of rain a fine Scotch mist, perhaps, about an hour before it began, no more.
For the first few days it remained a see-saw between hope and gloom, with some of the media still doing their best to stress the downside. A G4S guard was arrested for a bomb hoax, and there were persistent reports of ticket touting by members of the visiting athletic teams. But the story that threatened most embarrassment was the empty seat scandal a phenomenon seen at every Olympics, where the cameras dwell on seats not occupied by IOC members and other sporting officials, and the general punter who has tried and failed to buy tickets is whipped up into a state of understandable wrath.
We managed to solve the empty seat scandal, mainly by getting armed services personnel to sit in the gaps; and then it was claimed that London had been turned into a ghost town and that business was on its knees after our travel warnings including some perfectly reasonable announcements I made over the Tube, encouraging Londoners to plan their journeys were said to have scared people away.
Then I heard that the Live Sites, the special spectator zones we had created in Hyde Park and Victoria Park, were not always full. Where was everybody?
At one point I turned to my Olympic Adviser Neale Coleman, and said, It feels like we are giving the biggest party in the world, and no one is showing up.
Dont worry, he said. All Olympics are like this in the first few days. It will build.
In an attempt to drum up custom for the Victoria Park live site, I went out there to launch the zipwire. During the preparations for the Games I had insisted that we must have zipwires in the parks, even though Neale said that his experience from the Vancouver Winter Olympics was that they were more trouble than they were worth. I felt honour bound to give it a go.
When we got to Victoria Park I was slightly unnerved to find a Health and Safety Officer from Tower Hamlets was just finishing his checks, and it was proposed that I should be the first to launch myself into space.
Are you sure you shouldnt try it? I asked one of the fellows who seemed to be running it.
No, no, he said modestly. We dont want to spoil your photo.
The thing was a lot higher and a lot scarier than I had expected, but there was nothing for it. Waving a couple of plastic Union Jacks I lurched off the tower rather fast, and immediately found myself spinning round so that I couldnt see where I was going. I shot over knots of people in the park and then came to rest some way short of my destination, and about 30 feet up. A crowd formed beneath me as people twigged that this wasnt part of the plan. I tried diverting them with rousing remarks about how well our team was going to do against France and Australia. Their enjoyment of my position was growing, however, and there seemed no clear plan for getting me down.
The harness was starting to chafe, especially in the groin area.
Has anyone got a ladder? I asked.
No one had a ladder. At length I spotted my Special Branch personal protection officer, a nice chap called Carl. He had been seconded from his normal job of guarding Tony Blair, and was supposed I reasoned to rescue me from embarrassing predicaments.
Carl, I said, is there anything you can do?
Slowly he reached into his breast pocket, took out his mobile phone, aimed carefully, and took a picture of my dangling form The only positive thing you could say about the episode is that at least we gave that zipwire some publicity.
But the truth is that nothing was really going to give the thing lift-off until we started winning gold medals, and they were nerve-wrackingly slow in coming. The great cyclist Mark Cavendish didnt win his first road race on the Saturday, even though everyone told us that it was meant to be a cert. Then we didnt seem to be doing quite as well in the pool as we had hoped, and though Becky Adlington swam heroically, she didnt take gold, as she had in Beijing.
We seemed to be well behind France and Australia in the medals table. In fact we were languishing at about tenth or even twelfth and the French president François Hollande came over to say something smug about how decent it was of Britain to roll out the red carpet for French athletes to win on.
And then in the middle of the first week, round about the time Bradley Wiggins won his gold in the cycling time trial, you could feel something shift in the general mood a stirring in the noosphere.
Everyone was becoming transfixed by the sport even people who had hitherto had no real interest in sport; and the people who were lucky enough to get into one of the venues were reporting the time of their lives. Seb Coe, Paul Deighton and the rest of Locog deserve credit for many things, but if one thing distinguished London from Beijing, it was the punters experience your experience as a spectator.
A great deal of trouble was taken to manage you, psychologically, and to get you going. As you walked into the Olympic Park and other venues you were hailed cheerily by pink and magenta volunteers, some of them waving giant pink hands. They might chant a jovial slogan, or even sing some ditty they had made up themselves. And when you got to your seat, you didnt just sit there. You were coaxed to enter into the spirit of the thing by energetic comperes. There was thudding music to go with the sport, and any longueur was accompanied by a Mexican wave often led by the sporty young Royal Couple Kate and Wills, who seemed to be more or less everywhere. There was rhythmic clapping, to the tune of Queens We Will Rock You, with the entire crowd slapping their knees and then raising their arms like Aztec sun-worshippers.
If that didnt shatter your inhibitions, you might be asked to mime playing the bongos for the bongo cam, or you might be asked to stand up and dance before a crowd of tens of thousands or a vast global audience or you might be asked to kiss your neighbour, male or female, friend or stranger, for the kisscam.
It was a drama in which you became personally involved, and you were allowed to get carried away because of the sense of occasion that this was a once-in-a-lifetime transformation of the city that might never be repeated. Across London Locog had prepared the most astonishing scenery. Suppose you were in Horse Guards watching the Beach Volleyball. Lets be honest, most of us had never watched the game before in our lives I couldnt have told you the rules, or how many players there are per side. But there we were, surrounded by the old Admiralty, by Downing Street and William Kents lovely clutch of eighteenth-century Portland stone buildings and there in the middle was this thudding sandpit from Copacabana beach, with semi-naked people writhing around.
Each on its own was worth a look, but the sense of specialness was in the combination, the juxtaposition. That struck me as being different from other Olympics this mixture of old and new that is the genius of London: a city which is never complete but where ancient buildings stealthily acquire gleaming modern neighbours or additions, the interest of each being intensified by proximity to the other.
You went to Greenwich Park and you saw the rear ends of horses bucking high into the sky against a background of Wrens Hospital, and the towers of Canary Wharf behind Wrens masterpiece and the horses jumped to the tune of Van Halens Jump. When the time came at the end of the first week to begin the athletics it was clear that the stadium was a masterpiece of design. Even in the morning sessions it appeared to be (and was) bursting with humanity, and most athletes said they had never heard a noise like it.