 London Mayor Ken Livingstone over paying the bill, on May 15, 2003 Jowell duly persuaded a full Cabinet, including sceptics such as Gordon Brown, to give the London bid the go-ahead.
Over the next two years, until the International Olympics Committee announced the winning city on July 6, 2005, public and parliamentary support held firm and the £2.4bn remained unchanged.
Although armies of civil servants and consultants spent 18 months poring over the plans with the help of bean-counters from PricewaterhouseCoopers, it now turns out that when the bid was submitted in November 2004, VAT, inflation, security, project management and contingency costs were all omitted from the total.
How so many of Whitehall's best brains and expensive consultants missed this is the subject of much conjecture. Was it a collective cock-up on a scale impressive even by the standards of a government that supported the Millennium Dome? Or was there a concerted effort to keep quiet about the extra |
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| Terry Hill, chairman of Arup, who costed the Games at £1.8bn and are now designing the Olympic Park |
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billions until the Games were safely in the bag?
We simply don't know. But whatever the answer, the tab now stands at £9.3bn and taxpayers are being asked to pay at least £5bn more than originally claimed.
And yet despite this, many of the cheerleaders of the bid will prosper from the Games. The advisers whose low costings kicked it off, Arup, are part of a consortium that last year won a £55m contract to design the Olympic Park.
Another consultancy firm, Accenture, who spent £1m on sponsoring the bid, have won a contract to run IT and admin for the Games worth hundreds of millions. Accountants KPMG, who wrote a report extolling the Games' benefits for London, are now profitably reviewing the costs for the Government.
Cherie Blair's crucial enthusiasm won her a '2012 ambassador' position. And in five years' time a globe-trotting former Prime Minister will, no doubt, be able to make a triumphant call on East London. 
FIRST POSTED APRIL 5, 2007
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