Olympic Games 2012: Legacy

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, for prompting this insightful and multifaceted debate. Every aspect of the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics was a triumph and a tremendous credit to all who led those fine ventures from beginning to end, not least in our House and not least the noble Lord, Lord Hall, who is with us today. The bid itself was hard won—but well won. The gigantic infrastructure and arena construction programme was a model of successful implementation. Once the Games started, the outstanding achievements of our Olympians and Paralympians were a testament to not only individual talent, application and determination but, as we know, to skilful investment choices, to the professionalism of the coaching and to the rigour of the performance management.

The opening and closing events were sublime; Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony was his masterpiece, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, eloquently expressed earlier. As an event, it was audacious and deeply British. It captured our history and the transition from a picture-postcard, pastoral Britain to the very crucible of the Industrial Revolution. It reminded the world of the sports we have invented and of our writing tradition, from Shakespeare to James Bond to Harry Potter. It conveyed Britain’s unsurpassed contribution to modern popular music.

The opening ceremony held some delicious surprises and two of the best jokes ever, starring Rowan Atkinson and, unforgettably, Her Majesty the Queen. The stage management of the event, with a cast of thousands, was awesome and effortlessly smooth. The design, whether the amazing, inflating industrial chimneys or the use of the lighting tablets, was spellbinding, producing, as the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, said earlier, breathtaking imagery. All in all, as I said, it was a triumph.

One part of the overall legacy was that these Olympics defined all that is best in Britain at this moment in time; and they bound us all together, unashamedly proud of our Britishness. This very British staging of the Olympics also had, for me, some unexpected consequences. On holiday in Italy a few weeks after the Games, I was struck by the sight of innumerable young Italian men and woman wearing union jack T-shirts. In Sri Lanka recently, I noted exactly the same. In Paris in the autumn, wandering along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, I spied in the window of an upscale shoe shop an array of vastly expensive velvet slippers—not my kind of thing particularly—one pair of which had a beautifully stitched union jack as its main motif. Surprised and curious—I used to be a journalist—I went in and inquired of the manager whether there was any demand for such ostentatiously British wares among the citizens of Paris. He told me, and he insisted on this, that it was by far the hottest-selling item in his shop and that all the buyers were French. President de Gaulle, of whom I have just read an excellent biography, will be turning in his grave.

In Beijing just a few weeks ago, I happened to have lunch with a group of young Chinese journalists who volunteered, unprompted, how much they had enjoyed the opening ceremony—I promise that I did not prompt them in any way. One young woman journalist giggled and observed, “You British, you are gentlemen. And you are funny”. I thought that that was not a bad epitaph. She paused, then declaimed roundly, “Mr Bean!”. At which point, the whole table laughed uproariously, all remembering Mr Bean’s hilariously disruptive, and wholly unexpected, appearance as a London Symphony Orchestra keyboardist during the opening ceremony. We can surmise that every aspect of the Olympics and, above all, its opening, was a powerful statement about Britishness, not just for us but for the rest of the world, and that this statement will bring the United Kingdom many benefits in multiple spheres.

One lesson that I take away from it all is that our extraordinary success as a country in creating and funding national institutions such as the Arts Council, our art schools or the BBC, which husband and nurture our most creative and innovative talents, has a payback well beyond the edification of our citizens. Another lesson is that, with both a challenge and a deadline on the one hand and a governance structure on the other that brings together and unites the political parties, we can be creative, rigorous and disciplined, and achieve extraordinary things.

What a contrast there was between the dizzy heights of the Olympics and the Paralympics that we all remember so well—the unity that we all experienced—and the immediate gloom of a prolonged economic crisis, in some part of our own making, and of a decaying national infrastructure. What a contrast, too, with a reminder of our inability to develop a fit-for-purpose national air hub, one of our main economic lifelines to the rest of the world. The Olympics and the Paralympics showed that if we can find effective ways to combine and assemble our best talents, and if we can set aside our poisonous and disputatious political culture, we truly can as a nation achieve absolutely anything that we set out to do.