The great Olympic 'con' - paid for by us

The London Citizens event, a few weeks ago, felt real. Boris was booed by the multi-racial, working-class audience at the beginning but won many of them round by the end. And last Thursday's BBC Question Time was good, too: it gave us perhaps the gaffe of the campaign.

Ken was expanding on his brilliant success in what he had described the day before as "ensnaring ... billions" out of the Government for the Olympics. "You make it sound like a contrick!" exclaimed David Dimbleby. "It was," said Ken, to a mixture of cheering and astonished boos. "Literally. Absolutely. This has worked as I planned."

This was a genuinely remarkable moment - though one, alas, that neither Boris nor Brian had the wit to seize. Here was the Mayor admitting what he, and the Olympics minister Tessa Jowell, have fiercely denied for most of the past three years - that, in order to win public support for the Games, they conspired to set the original £2.4 million budget deceitfully low.

As well as being Ms 2012, Tessa Jowell is, of course, running Livingstone's campaign. Can there be any precedent for a candidate going on TV a week before polling day and accusing his own campaign manager of dishonesty?

Then there's the question of who was conned. Ken says it's the Government. But who pays for the Government? We do. We may, as he says, have our liability as council tax payers capped. But we are also national taxpayers, footing a bill that currently stands at just under £10 billion, is likely to rise to £12 billion and could hit as much as £20 billion.

But the real con is this. Without the Olympics, Mr Livingstone continued, "no Treasury, Tory or Labour, was ever going to put £10 billion into treating the polluted soil, putting in the transport infrastructure and building the new homes".

But we're not putting £10 billion into that, Ken. On the official estimates, £7.6 billion of the total £9.3 billion budget is going on building the sporting venues, security, tax, or contingencies. We're only putting £1.7 billion into " regeneration and infrastructure".

The reclamation of polluted land (for the sports venues) is a genuine Olympic achievement. But the housing was happening anyway, and so was almost all the transport infrastructure, before London even won the Games.

The main genuinely Olympicrelated transport feature will be the Soviet-style, officials-only lanes on our roads, so the absurd maharajas of the IOC can sweep from their 1,925 luxury hotel rooms to Stratford in their 3,145 chauffeur-driven cars. If we want to regenerate the East End, spend the money on the East End, not white-elephant stadia and suites at the Dorchester.

We laugh at our medieval ancestors who believed that alchemists could turn base metal into gold. But the Olympics, where the regeneration gold almost never comes, is the alchemy of the modern age. And now we have official confirmation of it, on television, from the most accomplished conman of our time.