OLYMPIC BID: The International Olympic Committee is in town. The bunting is out, traffic lights have been rephased and the Queen has promised not to mention Paris. All stops have been pulled as the capital goes for the ultimate sporting prize, and today, after what one hopes was a passable night recovering from business-class flights in a GBP 330-a-night hotel, the 13 members of the IOC's evaluation commission will officially begin their work.

London is the second of five cities the commission will have visited by the end of next month. Already Madrid has presented itself for inspection, and New York, Paris and Moscow will follow.

Should you mistakenly consider this nice work if you can get it, think again. Today alone the commission will be subjected to more than nine hours of presentations. There follows tomorrow's venue visits, during which the commission will brave the Jubilee line and the North Circular as the bid team talks up the new Wembley, plays down London's transport problems and tries to explain the Dome.

Then comes Friday's meeting at Downing Street with Tony Blair and sundry to drum home the government's support for the games, followed by dinner off the best china at Buckingham Palace.

The breathless itinerary demonstrates the lengths to which a modern city must go to persuade the IOC to bestow upon it the dubious privilege of hosting a games. It illustrates the looking-glass world of the IOC, one in which cities and sovereign states pander to a self-selecting, unaccountable and pompous organisation that five years ago was found to have accepted as much as $7m in bribes from a bidding city.

And for what? The lesson of recent games is that although the Olympics provide unforgettable moments for athletes and spectators, not to mention commercial benefits to the sponsors, they come at a price. All independent appraisals of the economic benefits agree that there are none. Environmentally, too, the games are disruptive, as the city in question accedes to the IOC's requirement for a compact event by merrily bulldozing sites to construct soulless concrete Olympic parks.

The IOC also demands that normal border controls be suspended and establishes a state-within-a-state in which elected officials are forced to give way to the Gucci-shod leaders of minority sporting federations.

As for the boost to a city's self-esteem and reputation, remove Sydney and Barcelona from the list of recent hosts and what are you left with? Seoul? The games that courtesy of Ben Johnson established drug cheats as a staple of the Olympic story.

Atlanta? Forever tarnished by the most crassly commercial and mismanaged games in modern history. Athens? A city that will be paying for decades for the privilege of being ridiculed for five years about its preparations.

In any sane world the IOC commissioners would have arrived yesterday on their knees, begging London to host the 2012 instalment before signing up Paris, Moscow, New York and Madrid to stage the four that follow.

Instead, five truly great cities willingly participate in a degrading display of synchronised crawling that bolsters the IOC's already inflated sense of self-importance.

This is most evident in its increasingly - and entirely hypocritical - high moral tone. Since the revelation of institutionalised corruption that followed the 2002 Salt Lake City winter games, the IOC has fought corruption by demanding that cities adhere to ludicrously tight regulations governing everything from cycle tracks to canapes. Effectively the IOC condescends to lecture others on probity.

Worse, the cities comply, demanding that all dissenting voices, no matter how legitimate, be stilled. So in Walthamstow library posters advertising a debate on London 2012 are pulled down as the local council backs the bid, and cabinet ministers ask journalists to suspend their critical faculties when it comes to the Olympics.

The IOC delegates are certainly welcome in London. But Seb, ask them for a number and tell them you'll be in touch.