The true cost of the Olympics

There was something rather un-British about all that grovelling to Fifa last week. That, at least, appears to be the new national consensus after even the combined charms of Prince William, David Cameron and David Beckham failed to land England the World Cup. We are not, we now realise, the kind of people who prostrate themselves to fat foreign sports bureaucrats. The mother of parliaments will never yield its cherished prerogatives to the rococo whims of some grubby Swiss tax-dodgers. Oh, wait a minute…

Entirely without the help of Mr Julian Assange, The Spectator today publishes an international sporting equivalent of the WikiLeaks cables. Our document cache is just as long, just as embarrassing to Britain, and just as closely held as the collected thoughts of the American diplomatic corps: it is the complete, contractually binding and previously confidential set of demands made by the 115-member International Olympic Committee (IOC) on poor old London for the 2012 Olympic Games.

Like the WikiLeak, the Olympics leak is by turns creepy and amusing. And it is just as revealing in its detail. We already knew, for instance, about the politburo nature of the IOC. What we did not know is that London is, according to these contracts, required to provide the IOC and the ‘Olympic Family’ (including the Committee members, staff and officials) with 40,000 hotel-room bookings for the entire duration of the Games. This includes 1,800 four- and five-star hotel rooms for the IOC elite. Six Park Lane hotels have been booked out for the duration of the Games, including the Dorchester, the Grosvenor and the Hilton.

The 40,000-room booking does not, of course, include accommodation for the competitors themselves — they are having an Olympic Village built for them at a cost to taxpayer of £325 million. Nor is any accommodation being reserved for spectators.