London 2012’s opening pomp hasn’t aged well

The extravaganza, 10 years on, seems like an ode to a nation that only existed in progressive imaginations

Ten years ago today, the world gathered for the opening of London’s Olympic Games. Around 900 million viewers tuned in around the globe; 27 million in Britain alone. It featured a cast of British icons. For one night only, James Bond teamed up with the Queen, Voldemort and Mr Bean were united at last.

Kenneth Branagh, in the garb of a Victorian industrialist, declaimed Caliban’s “Be not afeard” speech as he introduced the ceremony’s stunning opening setpiece, the unfolding of the Industrial Revolution. This section invoked Milton and Blake, as the “Green and Pleasant Land” of preindustrial Britain quickly gave way to “Dark satanic mills”. Inflatable chimneys rose priapically from the ground to release the five Olympic rings, “forged” in the melting heat. Like much of the country, I was transfixed.

Danny Boyle’s extravaganza felt quirky, irreverent and charmingly haphazard. It managed to avoid the mass rally vibes that can be a feature of such events. Beijing’s 2008 ceremony featured a group of 2,008 young men (geddit) drumming in perfect unison. We marvelled at this too but, in retrospect, those hyper-regimented drills look aggressive, militaristic – a terrifying foretaste of things to come.

If Beijing 2008 serves as a reminder of Western complacency, London 2012 was the event that launched a thousand wistful think-pieces. Commentators, usually male, middleclass and of a particular centre-left bent, love idealising the 2012 Olympics as a halcyon moment; pre-brexit, pre-corbyn. “Why can’t we go back to that feeling of togetherness,” they’ll ask – often the same people who did their bit for national unity in the intervening years by trying to overturn a democratic outcome they disliked.

Politics was simpler for progressives then – they delighted in seeing George Osborne booed and they attacked Mitt Romney, the mild-mannered Republican nominee for that year’s presidential election, as a threat to women’s rights. (The next Republican president, Donald Trump, was then tweeting about how the Duchess of Cambridge could “make a lot of money if she did the nude sunbathing thing”).

Not to go all Captain Hindsight on London 2012, but parts of the opening ceremony have aged like fine milk. Take that famous section devoted to the National Health Service (“the institution which more than any other unites our nation”, as the organisers chirpily informed us), featuring jiving nurses in retro uniforms and children in nightgowns bouncing around on luminous beds that spelt out the sacred acronym, “NHS”. Next, a group of Mary Poppins impersonators fought off the Childcatcher and other iconic fictional baddies before depositing the children safely back in their beds – the nannystate writ large. Now the health service is in a worse state than ever, in part because our continued reverence of the institution has scuppered all hope of a mature conversation about it.

Later on, a group of synchronised dancers stood together to form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament logo. This hasn’t aged too well either; especially now that Russia has invaded one of the two European countries that did unilaterally discard their nuclear weapons. The other (Belarus) has become a Russian satellite state. Greenham Common was never just a bit of cuddly cosplay. Shami Chakrabarti was there too, in her pre-corbyn days, selected by Boyle as one of the eight Olympic flag-bearers. “We salute her integrity,” chimed the voice-over.

Paul Flynn, the late Labour MP, blogged of his delight at the ceremony, which he called a “Trojan Horse” smuggling “progressive socialist sentiments” into the arena. Meanwhile, Aidan Burley, a Tory MP, sparked a national backlash for tweeting his distaste at “the most Leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen”.

London 2012 demanded an obligatory jollity which anticipated the enforced collectivism we saw during the Covid-19 lockdown. What of those other icons of Britishness? JK Rowling has been shamefully traduced by a liberal-left that once revered her. Even Shakespeare now comes with a trigger-warning.

Mr Boyle’s opening ceremony was visually magnificent, reflecting a raw national confidence which I really do miss nowadays. But its message was Whig history with added Blair. The ceremony largely ignored the British experience before the reforms of the Victorian era – no coincidence there. Had they included the English Civil War, one suspects it would have leaned more Roundhead than Cavalier.

The social scientist Benedict Anderson famously wrote of nationality as a series of “imagined communities”. A decade on from the London Olympics, and I wonder if the UK’S cultural elites developed something of an “imagined demos” in relation to a ceremony which entrenched in their minds the absolute perfection of their world view.

Perhaps the deep nostalgia for that time stems from a sense of frustration that the bread and circuses offered to the public in 2012 were later so comprehensively rejected. Britain didn’t quite turn out to be the country they wanted it to be – and they’ve never forgiven us for it.