Ken announced over the weekend that he'd rather like to keep his job throughout 2012 just to keep an eye on this Olympics nonsense:
"But when people get sick of me they will get rid of me. That's up to them. I am very keen to get through 2008 because I want to make sure we deliver the Olympics on time and on budget and get CrossRail under way. But I am sure that if I was not in post in 2012, I would be an honoured guest of the new mayor."
Whether Ken will be here or not is something we'll have to wait and see, but now that the Olympic purse strings are being drawn a little tighter sports fans may be worried that the whole thing will end up on a slighter less impressive scale than first envisioned:
The London 2012 Olympics aquatics centre will be smaller than originally planned in order to save costs. Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell sent the designer "back to the drawing board" last December as the original £75m budget looked set to double. The wave-shaped roof will now be 14,000 square feet, which is just over a third of the original 35,000 square feet.
We spotted a way to save even more money as there's a couple of perfectly good Olympic standard swimming pools a mere stone's throw away in Sheffield and Glasgow. Just keep the blinds drawn on the National Express coach and hire a couple of pearly queens to distract the athletes with eels, pie and mash when they arrive. Have the announcers speak in cockney rhyming slang and no one need ever know that they're not in London.
