Brown Stuff at the Olympics

Even though the Vicar of Downing Street is unlikely to make a speech there, the 2012 Olympics are at risk of being swamped in untreated sewage. The site chosen for the white elephant's trumpeting is near the Abbey Mills pumping station, known as the "cathedral of sewage", which deals with the largest overflow of waste in London excluding Charles Clarke and, like most of London's utilities, originates in the nineteenth century. A government advisory committee has warned of a "100% chance" of sewage overflows during the summer, and has suggested that it might cast a bit of a damper on events, presumably by distracting the olfactory nerves from the more edifying stink of mob perspiration, sporting lucre and sour grapes. The Government has therefore approved an eighteen-mile "super sewer" to prevent embarrassment. Like most things to do with the Olympics, the super sewer has managed to engorge its price even before anyone has started building it: last January the cost was estimated at £1,700 million, and now it is estimated at two thousand million. On the other hand, the estimated increase in the water bills of Londoners, whom the Government has dealt the honour of paying for it all, has been lowered from £45 a year to £37 a year. Doubtless this is a budgetary stratagem learned from the Prince in Waiting. It allows room for onward and upward manoeuvre so that, when the bill is finally settled at £44.99 a year, some sporting post-Gordonite chancellor can say that costs to the taxpayer have been kept below the estimate.