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For Marina
Contents
Dedication
Prologue: An Unexpected Triumph
London Bridge
Boudica
Hadrian
Mellitus
Alfred the Great
William the Conqueror
Geoffrey Chaucer
Richard Whittington
William Shakespeare
Robert Hooke
Samuel Johnson
John Wilkes
JMW Turner
Lionel Rothschild
Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole
WT Stead
Winston Churchill
Keith Richards
The Midland Grand Hotel
Epilogue: Mo Farah
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Boris Johnson
Copyright
About the Publisher
Sundry interesting London inventions have been interspersed in the text
We all have moments when we think we have really blown it, when we realise we have committed – or are in the process of committing – a goof that is irretrievable and from which there can be no realistic hope of return.
Such were my feelings, round about 9.30 pm, on Friday 27 July 2012.
It was the night of the Olympic Opening Ceremony. I was sitting in the special politburo seats in the stadium at Stratford, with Marina on my left and the Duchess of Cornwall (aka Camilla) on my right. Not far down the line was Her Majesty the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, the PM, Sam Cam, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge and the Countess Rogge, Lord Coe, Lady Coe, Michelle Obama, Mr and Mrs Mitt Romney and about 134 heads of state and government from democracies and tyrannies around the world.
We were all acutely conscious that there were about a billion people watching London, and it was a matter of national honour that we should not be seen scratching or picking our noses or behaving in any other unseemly fashion.
I was so overwrought that I will not deny that I had refreshed myself freely at the excellent VIP bar. But I can assure you, gentle reader, that this was nothing to do with the problem that overwhelmed me.
I was engaged in animated conversation with Camilla, who is every bit as wonderful as her most passionate advocates will tell you. She works blindingly hard, and has helped us a great deal in London to publicise campaigns against rape and domestic violence. She was enjoying the spectacle, and I kept leaning forward, toady-like, to make some point or other – to identify the flag of some nation, or to explain why the proceedings seemed to be partly in French. As I shifted my weight (over 16 and a half stone) I felt a little give in the seat beneath. It had been hitherto a comfortable perch, made of padded white leatherette, as swish as the rest of the Olympic stadium. But as I leaned a bit further forward, the underpinnings seemed to wheeze and bend with strain and then …
CRACK
… something serious snapped beneath my right buttock and after seven years of preparation for the Games, after all the speeches I had given about how ready we were, after all the trouble we had taken, as a country, to look competent and efficient I discovered in a millisecond of horror that I had bust my chair and that I was being pitched forward like a sack of coal or a keg of beer or a greased piglet on a tin tray.
And my head was going straight for Camilla’s lap.
As I dived unstoppably for the concrete floor, I reflected on the disgrace. I would have to say that I was drunk. It was the only excuse.
I couldn’t possibly blame the workmanship of the Olympic Delivery Authority, not after we had spent the thick end of half a billion pounds on building this stadium. I thought about the headlines, the savagery of the Olympo-sceptic press. I thought of the TV footage, the absurd sight of the Mayor of the Host City suddenly slipping forward and out of view, like a soldier shot out of line in a Napoleonic battle.
With effort I avoided collision with the knees of the Duchess and grovelled on all fours in front of her like some wheezing retriever; and I thought, as I prepared to haul myself back up, before global derision, that it wasn’t the first disaster of the evening.
It can now be revealed that a large chunk of the VIP party almost missed the ceremony altogether. For some reason it was decided that we should all take a bus from St James’s Palace through the rush hour traffic to East London, and we set off in plenty of time. There was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition and Mrs Miliband, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and various bemedalled heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as other important ministers and spokespersons. You could have founded a perfectly viable country with that cast list. We had the great Sir Keith Mills, the unsung hero of the Olympics and the man who had done so much to secure the Games for London, we had all sorts of Olympics honchos who had offered up the best part of a decade to preparing for this moment, and we had an excellent driver. But no one had explained to him, with sufficient clarity, about where to exit from the A12, and indeed it turned out, as the evening wore on, that no one was able to explain. We got lost.
We noticed that we were passing the same anti-capitalist protest for the second time. We could see the mystic meccano of the ArcelorMittal Orbit getting closer then edging tantalisingly away. We appeared to be going round and round East London in ever-widening circles and it became increasingly clear that neither Sir Keith nor the driver nor anyone on board had a detailed plan as to how we should penetrate the Olympic Park, and a sort of panicky hilarity took hold of me – an unreal sense that this was beyond anything dreamed up by Armando Iannucci or the satirical scriptwriters of the sitcom Twenty Twelve.
It would be fair to say that when we finally got there – arriving, in breach of protocol, after assorted members of the Royal Family – my nerves were pretty shot; and so as I crouched at the feet of the Duchess I could feel that sense of hysterical absurdity rising again. I hauled myself back on to the listing seat, stiffening my haunches into a kind of squat, to avoid putting too much weight on the busticated mechanism. I looked around. No one, of course, had noticed.
They didn’t hear the crack. They didn’t register my disappearance. They were overwhelmed with the colour and noise of Danny Boyle’s pageant.
Shortly after the Opening Ceremony was over, a Tory MP tweeted words to the effect that it was a load of lefty cobblers; and though he was duly monstered by all and sundry, you could see why certain sensibilities might have been provoked.