Olympic costs history re-writen

Last week a headline proudly proclaimed yet another "Olympic victory": the games had cost "only (sic) £8.921bn  against an  original budget of £9.28bn."  This represents a saving £377m, and is thus greatly to the credit of the Locog and, by extension, our government and British guts, grit, determination and organisational flair.

With accounting like this any project can be a financial success. The "original" original budget, in the bid put in by the then government in 2007, was £2.4bn.

We normally attribute the rewriting of history to the Soviet Union under Stalin.  That this should be happening, without, as afar as I have noted, so much as a murmur, in our own "free" society, is baffling.