Tonight:
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As the Olympic torch continues its troubled journey around the globe, one thing is embarrassingly clear: Britain entered into collusion with a propaganda exercise conceived to benefit the regime in Beijing and has ended up at the heart of a thumping great international PR fiasco. The Government's decision to dignify the event with full honours now looks as foolish as it was cynical.
As San Francisco goes the way of Paris and London today, with protests disrupting the progress of the spluttering symbol, the whole thing may well be called off. Even if it does continue on its luckless way, the sour images of pro-Tibet protestors being hauled out of the way by democratic policemen and undemocratic Chinese officials will dominate our memories.
The flame is also set to pass through Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, where Chinese troops have been beating and killing protestors to suppress the latest uprising. Beijing, which preaches the need to keep politics out of the Games when it suits it, is shamelessly political in deciding on the symbolic use to which it is putting the flame: namely to reassert its territorial claim to its autonomy-seeking neighbour.
How do we feel about this? I ask because there is no official answer that I can discern, beyond the limp-wristed suggestion that it might be nicer if the Chinese stopped beating up monks and violently suppressing demonstrations.
It was controversial enough to award the Games to China in the first place. The moral and practical case for doing so was simple: the exposure and significance of the event would encourage the opening up of the country and encourage a liberalisation of its political system to match the galloping economic progress of the past few years. The events of the past few weeks in Tibet do not bear out that hope. Indeed, the regime continues to arrest and imprison major dissidents such as Hu Jia and to "re-educate" without trial those who have opposed the Games or sought to draw attention to the shortcomings of the penal and judicial system.
None of this seems remotely to bother any of our leading politicians. Gordon Brown and George Osborne have both completed their personal China odysseys in the past few months and returned mouthing awe-struck pieties about the economic roar of an Asian tiger, while keeping their mouths tightly shut about the lack of progress on human rights in the run-up to the great showpiece event this year.
It is not so much a kowtow as a shrug of the shoulders. Yet the Herculean effort China has put into its Games shows that the regime - now rejuvenated by the addition of a foreign secretary younger than David Miliband - is far more concerned than it was about the good opinion of the outside world. That is why it laid such emphasis on the blasted torch procession to start with.
There was no good reason for Mr Brown to involve himself in the relay at all. Most other sensible heads of state managed to avoid doing so and are consequently less implicated in the farce that has ensued.
The past weekend looked very much like displacement activity, calculated to distract us from what really worries ministers, namely the rising cost of the Olympics in straitened economic circumstances and the accusations that they failed to budget anywhere near accurately for the cost.
I say all this as someone who would break the bank to host the 2012 Games (and we appear to be doing just that). Still I stubbornly find something uplifting in the battered Olympic ideal and am glad that London will finally have its turn. My anger about the images on Sunday is not the "told you so" feeling of those who hanker for things to go wrong on the way to 2012. Rather, I expect the run-up to the London Games to be judiciously stewarded - not traded for a cheapening spectacle.
Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister, fumbled her way around the scenes of demonstrators being dragged away by police and the bizarre sight of Chinese security men barking orders at torch carriers as "in no way an endorsement of the Chinese behaviour in Tibet or any action of the Chinese government".
Come off it, Tessa. Which do we think might be more prominently reported - or indeed reported at all - in Beijing? A huge rally through the streets of London, protected by the Met's finest , culminating in a personal reception by the Great (for now) Leader Gordon Brown? Or a mealymouthed statement from Mr Brown afterwards saying: "In a human-rights dialogue with China we make our views perfectly clear."
We don't actually. The PM's visit to China was accompanied by no public comment of any weight on human rights. The return to the old policy of keeping criticism of the regime on coyly private terms has been entirely unproductive.
This PM treads even more softly with Beijing than his predecessor did. No minister delivered a speech of any depth of feeling about Tibet. Where is Mr Miliband, the modernising Foreign Secretary, on this challenge for his generation - seeing as he defines himself as a child of the 1989 people's revolutions?
At the launch of the FCO's human rights report recently, Mr Miliband managed one paragraph on China and a brief mention of Tibet: a wasted opportunity, or a deft piece of self-censorship. Only the more outspoken Lord Malloch Brown has made the obvious but neglected point that if Beijing wants international respect for hosting the Games, it had better earn it by laying off protestors in the streets of Lhasa.
The PM has, of course, written a book praising the courage of various historical figures who stood up to repressive regimes. How strange that he should be so sotto voce about this one.
Not that David Cameron is any stronger in the spine. He has missed a major chance to define himself and show that he stands for more than the politics of convenience on foreign affairs. Lord Coe, the leading Conservative running Britain's Olympic preparation, told the truth by accident when he was caught on a tape describing the Chinese security men at the procession as "thugs" - only to disavow his own comments afterwards by telling us it was a pity that protestors has spoiled a nice day out.
Our part in the "flame of shame" saga is a sorry tale of weakness and lack of judgment from the top downwards. Suddenly, Britain's Olympian classes look rather puny. Shame on them all, really.
Reader views (3)
Excellent article. The telling sentence was "It is not so much a kowtow as a shrug of the shoulders". Problem is we need the Chinese more than they need us, so we tiptoe around fundamental issues such as abuse of basic human rights. I suppose the majority of the people around the world think, it isn't us, so it doesn't matter.
- Vij, London, 09/04/2008 14:30
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Entirely agree with most of what you have written. But there is an additional element to this which is rather important. On many occasions when I was a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, the body which holds the Met to account, I asked about foreign police on the streets at the Olympics, about their status and about the alarming demand by the EU that Europol officials have lifetime immunity from prosecution for any crime except parking offences.
I never really received a satisfactory response, and to judge by the confusion about these Chinese security guards, there is uncertainty about who invited them, what they were there for and what their status was. If we cannot even get this right now, what are we going to do about armed goons from a large number of countries, including our 'allies', on our streets in August 2012?
Had the Chinese guards inadvertently cracked someone's head open by pushing them over in London or Paris, resulting in a death, would they have had immunity from prosecution? Would they be arrested in front of the crowd? What about if they'd seriously roughed someone up?
Olympic dream? Or Olympian nightmare?
- Damian Hockney Am, London, 09/04/2008 14:08
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I was a little undecided about the argument that it is the Olympic Torch and thus a symbol of sport and co-operation. Then I heard that it had already completed the trip from Greece to China, only to be sent off around the globe again by the host nation.
From then it becomes nothing more than a show-piece, and the neutrality of international sport and games is gone.
- Gsp, Hants, UK, 09/04/2008 14:01
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