The Spectator’s notes | 30 June 2012

For too long, out of a high-minded desire not to spoil anyone’s pleasure, this column has avoided the subject of the Olympics. But when I came to London this week, after an absence of ten days, I found I could remain silent no longer. My walks through St James’s Park, so good for body and soul, and so much more efficient for getting where I wish to go than other means of transport, have been banned. The park is closed. This is partly to allow Olympic beach volleyball to spoil Horse Guards, but also, apparently, for ‘security reasons’, the great tyrant’s excuse of our times. According to the Royal Parks, the park will not ‘return to its pre-Games condition’ until the spring of 2013. For anyone unOlympic living, working in or visiting London between now and September, there is nothing but boredom, inconvenience and officially sanctioned insolence on offer. Thanks to the loathsome ideology of the Olympics, which manages somehow to be fascist and internationalist at the same time, free expression has been banned, and anyone using the Games symbol or the word ‘Olympic’ in any way is threatened with arrest. We have to sacrifice our capital city’s roads so that sporting officials can drive round at their ease. Fifteen thousand soldiers — nearly a fifth of our entire army once it has been shrunk by next week’s cuts — will be unwillingly on hand to pump up the bogus prestige of the event. The total cost to the taxpayer is monumental. Needless to say, everyone who can is getting out of town for the period, and the recession will deepen as a result. Hotel revenues and houses let for the Games will achieve nothing like the prices that were predicted, and ticket sales for some sports are also weak.