It might all have been hugs and cuddles in the Downing Street garden as Nick Clegg and David Cameron launched their (surely doomed) coalition this week, but it didn’t take long for the new Government to start rubbing people up the wrong way.
Jeremy Hunt (no, it isn’t rhyming slang), the new Minister for Media, Olympics, Culture and Sport managed to annoy both Bozza and the former Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, by suggesting that the 2012 Olympic Games wasn’t immune from Government cuts.
Hunt suggested that £66 million might have to be saved, if the Government’s planned cuts were split equally across all departments.
As you might imagine, BoJo wasn’t best pleased with this. A statement on the Mayor’s behalf said, “Significant savings have been found since Boris Johnson became mayor and all involved are continuing to seek further savings and ensure the best value for money possible for taxpayers. The mayor agrees that as a result of all this hard work to control cost, it should be possible to realise some savings now, but it would be a mistake to take too much money out of the Olympic budget, only to be forced to put more back in closer to the Games.
“The mayor is also completely committed to the commitments made to the regeneration legacy in east London and believes it would be a false economy to short-change the planned investment in this.”
Frantically backpedalling (a sport which we could excel in if the IOC introduced it by 2012), Olympic officials ‘were redoing their calculations and were confident that the Games would not be impacted’, reported the Daily Telegraph.
Jeremy Hunt was probably scared Boris would make him take the high jump. When Boris was all forceful and said “I can tell you now, it isn’t going t happen”. I was really scared. And I haven’t even done anything wrong.