Maybe it's because they are Londoners

LETTER FROM LONDON:London has what few of the previous host cities had – an unassailable sense of its own greatness, writes  KEITH DUGGAN

YES, MILLIONS of people swarming like flies around Waterloo underground.

For the past few days, the usual landmarks seemed manic with energy and even the most unimpressed of Londoners seemed to accept that something special is happening in their city.

We should have known. After all the grousing about security and the cost of the bloody Olympics, and the cheek of the Olympic people taking up the roads with their flash bloody limos, and the Tubes more crowded and sweltering than in most Julys, and a million Americans gathering at Leicester Square wanting to know how to get to Traaaaaw-fal-gar, and who that funny old guy carrying the torch was (It was Brucie Forsyth), and the doorman outside the theatre where the crowds were gathering for The Mousetrap (Now the world’s longest-running show!) having a crafty fag and talking about Mark Cavendish, the British cyclist, and the Victorian boozers behind Charing Cross crowded with the after-work hordes, and Boris Johnson mobbed like a rap star at the concert in Hyde Park, and the last in a series of Churchillian addresses from David Cameron, London cast its spell.

After all the griping and the debates about whether the London Olympics would be any good, the most basic and obvious truth revealed itself. London has what few of the previous host cities of recent decades had: an unassailable sense of its own greatness.

So when the Olympic torch made its last trip through the heart of the city, it all fell into place. It helped that it was 30 degrees and brilliantly sunny but even if this had been one of London’s greyer days, it wouldn’t have mattered.

Once the torch was carried past St Paul’s Cathedral and along Oxford Circus and past St Martin-In-The-Fields, people swooned. Londoners forgot themselves. Those that could ditched work early and gathered with tens of thousands of visitors on the streets. And when the torch flickered into view, tens of thousands of mobile phones were held aloft to capture the moment. Even Nelson, snooty as ever on that obnoxious column, seemed to cock his head to see what all the fuss was about.

Mayor Boris took up his quill and penned an essay in yesterday’s Evening Standard describing what was happening in his city as a “contagion of joy”. (Only a Tory). He wrote wondering about his brush with Wasted Youth. “I talked to a hard bitten 12-year-old whose heroes are Tony Montana of Scarface and Eric Cartman of South Park. Would he be going out to look at the torch relay, I asked. Nah, he said, sucking his teeth and continuing to watch Family Guy. Oh well, I said. And then he nipped out for an hour and when he came back his face was flushed and his eyes glowing and he said: ‘That was the most incredible thing I have seen in all my life.’”

That was London on Thursday. But Downing Street and Westminster Abbey and all the famous sites will play second fiddle to the neglected East End for the next fortnight. This is East London’s time to shine.

Around midnight on Thursday at Canary Wharf, a man strolled into the train carriage carrying a restaurant chair over his shoulder. He looked cheerful if a bit worse for wear and once the doors closed and the train started to move, he set his chair down and took up residence in the middle of the carriage. The train was filled with stragglers who had stayed until closing time in the pubs tucked beneath the hulking glass buildings at the Wharf.

Most people were tipsy and looked on in amusement as the man settled into his transportable chair. He stretched out his legs: it would have been no surprise if he produced a snifter and had himself a Hamlet moment. “Rich b****ds,” he explained to the carriage in general. “They’re just rich b*****ds . . . so I took their chair.”

After a while, he heard an accent and when he heard we were from Ireland, he leaned forward excitedly. “I’m from facking Ireland,” he said in the broadest East End accent since Gary Kemp starred as Ronnie Kray. “My mother was from Cawk. You know it?”

And then he went on a long and fiercely passionate speech about how the kids in school wouldn’t believe that he was from England. “We had black hair and big noses . . . they’d tell us we were Greeks or Turks. But we were Irish.”

And he was. He knew the counties, knew the sports. “You got great teams over there,” he told us. “You’ve the rugby and the Gaelic football. You’ve got the hurling.” As the train began to slow, he rose and offered an official welcome.

“To the real London. To the East End,” he said. And then got off the train at All Saints and disappeared into the night, carrying the rich b****rds’ chair with him.

So far, the East of London does not seem all that different from the north or the west. No cheeky barmen asking punters if they want a few cubes of white mice in their Arfur Scargill, nobody going down to the Eastern Tandoori for a Ruby Murray, nobody complaining about having to climb five flights of apples and pears. And the visitors want to embrace all things London.

On the way out to the Olympic Stadium yesterday, the father of a German family pointed excitedly at a platform and exclaimed in delight: “Look at the ze Bobby,” pointing at a profoundly bored looking policeman who had been given the unpromising beat of patrolling the platform at sleepy Pontoon Dock.

The German children waved at Ze Bobby and he waved back. If he is still waving in a fortnight’s time, he deserves a promotion.

In the end, London had no choice but to roll out the barrels for this, its third Olympics.

They took an indecently long time to decide they could be bovvered but there was no escaping the fact that the haughtiest city of them all was a bit charmed by itself in the last few hours before HRH and James Bond and Becks and the other assortment of Best of Britain were scattered across Olympic Park last night.

What was it that Lord Burghley said back in 1948 when he announced, with typical British understatement, the opening of those Olympics when the war time smoke was still in the air? “The hour has struck.”

So it has. And even London skipped a heartbeat.