Olympic delusions

Britain was swept up in the euphoria of staging London 2012. Now we face the real Olympic legacy, says Merryn Somerset Webb. A huge pile of extra debt.

I missed the Olympics. We spent the entire period on a small island north of Scotland with no phone reception or TV. When we left, everyone we talked to was irritated about the Olympics. Irritated by the way politicians insisted the £9.3bn (at least) cost was "within budget", when the original budget was £2.4bn, and when most final estimates put the cost at around £12bn.

Irritated by the London traffic restrictions. Irritated by the exhortions from the organisers not to be so churlish as to be irritated. Irritated by the ludicrous spectacle of the tens of police outriders and sponsorship lorries belching carcinogenic diesel fumes into their children's faces when they made the mistake of going out to watch the torch go by. And maddened by the fact that this orgy of other people's glory would cost each of them, as taxpayers, £400 or so.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.