ACCOUNTING and sport really don't go well together, as demonstrated again this week with the official claim that the 2012 Olympics delivered economic benefits worth £10 billion.
A suspiciously round number, you may think, doubly so when you consider it neatly tops the £9 billion cost - too neatly, in my view.
Vince Cable, a professional economist, declined to give the estimate a ringing endorsement, or indeed much endorsement at all, telling Radio Four: 'It is the best we can do – it is not necessarily something that would pass muster in the best academic journals but a test of credibility has been applied to it.'
One person who has been here before, albeit on a smaller scale, is Claire Short, former Birmingham MP and ex-Cabinet Minister. In the mid-Eighties, Birmingham's city council decided to stage a Formula One race along the lines of the Monaco Grand Prix. Short, along with three other Labour MPs in the city - Roy Hattersley, Jeff Rooker and Terry Davis - opposed the race but pretty much everyone else on the political scene was in favour.
For what happened next, I am indebted to Andy McSmith's excellent book Faces of Labour (Verso; 1996).
'The first two races, in 1986 and 1987, made a combined loss of £1 million, but the third showed a profit of £536,000 in the accounts drawn up by the city council. It emerged, though, that this had been achieved by making an estimate that the race had generated free publicity worth £600,000 and transferring that amount from the council's advertising budget to cover what would otherwise have been a loss.'
Short accused the council of behaving dishonourably. About right, I'd say.
1) Treble plagues on houses all round
WATCHING the current spat between the senior civil service and the Cabinet Office puts me in mind of Henry Kissinger's remark about the Iran-Iraq War: a shame they can't both lose.
The bust-up is over plans by Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude to allow Ministers more leeway in terms of selecting their advisers, a proposal claimed to put at risk the British tradition of an impartial civil service.
I'm sure Maude is a decent enough fellow: my wife used to work for him during her mis-spent youth as a Whitehall girl, and he is my sister's MP. But I cannot think this is the time to spend taxpayers' money putting politicians' mates on the public payroll.
As for the glories of the civil service, I fear this is yet another aspect of British public life, along with the BBC, the NHS and the police, that we are deluded into believing is the envy of the world. The string of failures - IT procurement disasters, asylum backlogs, lost computer files, spending over-runs - almost certainly reflects the fact that the service's higher ranks will increasingly be staffed by those who have passed through the education process since the advent of dumbing down and grade inflation.
It's not helped, of course, by the generation of super-bright people lost to the City during the Nineties and Noughties.
These days, I fear, you are no more likely to find Sir Humphrey Appleby running a large department than you are to find Captain Mainwaring running a bank branch.
2) Once again, doctor...
AN excellent piece can be found on the ghastly bossy Tory MP (and doctor, obviously) Sarah Wollaston at The Spectator magazine's Coffee House blog by clicking here
3) Bringing it all back home
IN the real Speccie (i.e. the one printed on paper and sold in shops) Charles Moore has a nice item on the closure of his old village school, Mountfield and Whatlington (C of E) Primary, between Robertsbridge and Battle. Like the great man, I grew up in rural East Sussex and attended a village primary school.
Mr Moore notes: 'Most pupils had long-standing Sussex names - Crouch, Spray, Avann, Lavender.'
Where we lived, the aftermath of the Norman Conquest was still pretty evident in the playground. Children with surnames such as French, Norman and Reynard tended to have dark hair, whereas those with names such as Fletcher or Ticehurst were more likely to be fair haired.
That was exuberant diversity, 1970-style. Normans. And Saxons.
Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.
dan.atkinson@live.co.uk
Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan