Queen and Philip were game to help UK win Olympics
PRINCE Philip’s enthusiasm and the Queen’s charm were secret weapons in securing the 2012 Olympics, those involved in the bid have revealed.
A Buckingham Palace state banquet was central for wooing IOC members to back London.
Six months later London was announced as surprise winner in July 2005, beating front-runner Paris to host the 30th Olympiad.
Radio 4’s The Reunion brought together key people involved. They revealed how to win the Games a city needed a good story and to appeal to the heads and hearts of IOC members.
Baroness Tanni Grey-thompson, a wheelchair athlete who has won 11 Paralympic Gold medals, recalled how the Queen worked her magic with guests.
She said: “This was a quite intimate dinner at Buckingham Palace. It was beautifully done and, whoever you are in the world, going through the gates of Buckingham Palace and being met by Her Majesty the Queen gets people to stop and think.”
Former head of the bid Barbara Cassani added: “My abiding memory of that dinner was when a bunch of us was left upstairs and we were looking out of the window as the Queen was saying goodbye.
“And there was Prince Philip standing next to us bouncing on his toes saying, ‘So how do you think we did? How do you think we did?’ It was this incredible enthusiasm. You can’t make this stuff up.”
But the American-born businesswoman also revealed she had shunned civil servants when building up the successful bid team and found the Treasury “arrogant and dismissive”. At meetings “everybody had a notebook and looked at you very, very dismissively. It was like being a school child.”
Chief executive Sir Keith Mills also revealed he fended off Treasury officials wanting to talk budgets by making sure then chancellor Gordon Brown had given him a letter setting out who pays for what.
But Sir Keith recalled how BBC Panorama exposing alleged corruption at the IOC on the eve of Athens’s Olympics 2000 nearly scuppered the bid.
He said: “I remember meeting members of the IOC in the lobby of the hotel – they were pretty clear that this programme had killed our bid.”
Victory on July 6 was tempered by four bombs that killed 52 people in London the day after.
Richard Caborn, then Labour’s sports minister, said that “we made sure those actions will never ever win the argument”.
The Reunion, Radio 4,
11am today