The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 4 August 2012

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After an opening ceremony going on into the early hours, directed by Danny Boyle and watched at one point by 26.9 million viewers in Britain, the Olympic Games in the Lea valley settled down to its sporting business, with only marginal complaints about empty seats, food queues, over-protective branding and the loss of the keys to Wembley stadium. The locks were changed. Two hundred and four copper petals attached to steel tubes had risen into the air without a hitch to form an Olympic cauldron of flame, to the designs of Thomas Heatherwick. The Queen had co-operated in making a jokey film sequence with Daniel Craig in the character of James Bond, during which she pretended to parachute into the stadium. Predictions of medal numbers for Britain seemed initially over-optimistic.

Business leaders visiting London for the Olympics asked David Cameron, the Prime Minister, what was happening to Britain’s economy, according to the FT, as figures showed a shrinking of GDP by 0.7 per cent in the second quarter. HSBC set aside $1.3 billion for compensation for mis-selling payment protection insurance in Britain and $700 million for fines in the United States following accusations of money laundering. Santander, successor to Abbey National, which had offered small businesses free banking ‘forever’, wrote to 230,000 small businesses telling them that their accounts will cost them at least £7.50 a month. House prices in July were 2.6 per cent lower than a year earlier, according to the Nationwide building society. Pershore Plum Festival opened with purple balloons and a Plum Princess, but no plums, which are late this year.

An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Stoke-on-Trent infected 19 and killed one. An attempt is to be made to recover the bell of the cruiser HMS Hood, sunk in 9,000ft of water by the Bismarck in 1941, with the loss of 1,415 men.

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