Boston’s in a hole and still digging. Will London’s Olympics go the same way?

On the way into Boston from Logan Airport, you pass a cavernous, closed-off tunnel entrance, full of construction vehicles, looking at night like an avant garde set for Siegfried. This is one end of the ‘Big Dig’, America’s greatest civil engineering fiasco, and it offers a useful corrective for the British inferiority complex about competence in large-scale public projects. The news that the facilities for the 2012 London Olympics look set to cost at least £6 billion, rather than the £2.4 billion first quoted, surprised no one this week, and nor did the departure of Jack Lemley, the American chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, who said he was resigning because he did not want to be associated with a project that is doomed to be over-budget and behind schedule. But looking at what has happened in Boston, not to mention New Orleans or Baghdad, we might wonder why a 71-year-old from Boise, Idaho — who, according to Ken Livingstone, had been looking less than perky after recent heart surgery — was picked above the finest talents of British engineering to take charge of our Olympic stadia in the first place? And why do American troubleshooters have such a high reputation over here that, for example, a subsidiary of Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s old firm) was asked to oversee the Ministry of Defence’s ‘future aircraft carrier’ project?

Perhaps the quangocrats involved in these appointments think all Americans are wisecracking ass-kickers like Tommy Lee Jones in his role as federal emergency chief for Los Angeles in Volcano.