All at sea - how I missed the London Olympics but delivered a petition

Throughout the Olympics in Paris commentators have found it impossible not to talk about the London Olympics in 2012.

By common consent, the London Olympics are now considered something of a triumph, not least the opening ceremony that celebrated James Bond, Mr Bean, the Industrial Revolution and, less appropriately, the NHS.

Prior to the 2012 Games, however, I was one of many sceptics. Writing in December 2011, I noted:

A colleague told me about a conversation he had with a friend who works for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

Apparently, there was no great enthusiasm within the department for Britain to host the 2012 Olympics. Indeed, some people hoped that Paris would win the nomination and save us a large fortune.

London, it was argued privately, would still benefit because lots of Olympic visitors would stay here and travel to Paris on Eurostar. France would bear the cost of the whole thing and Britain would be sitting pretty.

However there was one minister who really wanted the Olympics to come to London and it wasn't Tessa Jowell, former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, now shadow minister for the Olympics. It was the prime minister, Tony Blair.

Allegedly there was even an attempt to nobble Blair's visit to Tokyo where the IOC was meeting to decide the nomination. Sadly the plot was foiled and the PM (with a little help from Seb Coe, David Beckham and others) triumphed.

Cue long faces at DCMS.

Now, I am told, officials privately laugh at the idea that the Olympics will come in on budget. For example, the current figure (£9 billion) doesn't cover the cost of security which could add a further £2-3 billion.

A year before the event I nevertheless applied for £800 worth of tickets, but demand (as I explained here) was so high the only thing I got were two tickets for the boxing (South Arena 2, ExCel, Session BX001, July 28, 13:30hrs) which I hadn’t asked for.

Unable to see any of our preferred events in person, and still a bit ambivalent about the whole thing, I decided instead to book my family on a 12-day Mediterranean cruise that largely overlapped with the Games back home.

Apart from the opening ceremony, we therefore missed almost every moment of note including Super Saturday, the penultimate day, when Team GB won three gold medals on the track in just 45 minutes.

I don’t regret my decision, though, and looking back on my notes at the time the cruise wasn’t without incident.

Ports of call included Cannes, Cadiz/Seville (extremely hot), Rome (ditto), Sardinia, Barcelona, and Gibraltar (more of which in a minute).

Things were complicated by the fact that the government consultation on plain packaging had been extended by a month and the closing date for submissions was now August 10 when I was due to be at sea.

The issue was, it wasn’t just a question of submitting a digital response. That was easy enough, and I may have done it before we left Southampton.

The major problem was how to physically submit the 235,000 signatories we had continued to gather via a street petition in 30 towns and cities when I wasn’t there to oversee the task.

Thankfully, we worked out a plan and at 10.20am, on Wednesday August 8, 2012, 29 boxes were successfully delivered to the Department of Health in Waterloo Road, London.

Each one contained the names and addresses of people who had signed the Hands Off Our Packs petition against plain packaging.

The delivery, as I wrote here, ‘was conducted with (almost) military precision by a crack team of Forest operatives’.

Meanwhile I was in Gibraltar liaising with the team in London before sending out the press release that led to these and other reports:

235,000 sign petition against plain tobacco packs
Plain packaging petition sent to Department of Health

Funnily enough, it transpired later that we had underestimated the number of signatories. The final figure - taking into account both the petition and postcards submitted to the Department of Health via the Hands Off Our Packs campaign - was 269,854.

But that wasn’t confirmed until July 2013 when the DoH finally published its report on the consultation, eleven months after the closing date.

As for Gibraltar, perhaps it was the stress I was under that day (had we not delivered our petition signatories to the DoH it would have been an absolute disaster), but I struggled to see the attraction.

I’m not sure what I expected but the reality was a far cry from the 1950s chocolate box image of England I had erroneously imagined.

Perhaps my (unrealistic) expectation of finding a little piece of England on the Spanish peninsula had set the bar too high, but I know better now.

See also: Return to Seville and Rome for a day. Same cruise but several days earlier. Now that’s what I call stressful!