Ssshhh ... don’t criticise the London Olympics

Thought crime isn’t a confirmed sport for the 2012 Olympics, but Hackney council would be gold-medal favourites if it ever were.

Iain Sinclair, the author, was booked into his local library in Stoke Newington to give an apparently harmless talk about his new tome Hackney, That Red Rose Empire. That was until he received a mysterious phone call. “The person who invited me was told they were no longer allowed to have me because I had been critical of the London Olympics,” the author says. “I thought that in a library surely we can debate these issues and don’t have to be on-message, but apparently not. I was a nonperson and was to be blackballed.”

Sinclair’s crime was to pen a piece in the London Review of Books called The Olympics Scam, criticising the planning of 2012 and saying that the legacy would be “lasting shame”.

A spokesman for Hackney council said that it would be inappropriate to host a launch for a book “expressing controversial or political opinions”.

The author is baffled. “They can’t know anything about this book because it is not published for another three months.”

President Bush’s “catastrophic” intervention in Iraq has served to discredit the very idea of Western democracy, Boris Johnson roared in a fulsome endorsement of Barack Obama. How different to 2003 when our hero wrote: “Whatever the faults of his Government, Bush has rid the world of a tyrant who deprived his people of freedoms taken for granted in London . . . He liberated Iraq. It is good enough for me.” But not any more, it would seem.

Observers were mystified by Barry Gardiner’s behaviour at yesterday’s Peter Mandelson grilling. Plonking himself in the press seats, Gardiner, the MP stripped of his “forestry adviser” role after rubbishing the PM, spent the session scribbling on a sheet of paper. When he had filled it from top to bottom he turned the page on its side and began writing over his previous handwriting. Why? “I’m Scottish,” he replied. Perhaps the frugal MP is still being kind to the forests.

After exhausting the lute, Sting is plotting an opera with Elvis Costello. “I play a steel worker who falls in love with the opera, much to the chagrin of his communist friends,” the Police man tells the Courier-Mail in Australia. “But when [Costello] suggested we do an opera, I said, ‘I am not going to wear tights’.”

It’s a brave man who clamps a car driven by Baroness Boothroyd. The former Speaker was furious when a visit to Brontë country in Haworth with a friend was ruined by a clamp. Their ticket had time left, but was face down. “He didn’t know her and it wouldn’t have made any difference,” an unrepentant clamper manager said.

Postscript

Scarlett Johansson has announced that she is going back to her Scandinavian roots and will host the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo on December 11. Diana Ross will sing.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s new lifestyle website, Goop, offers “new age” tips, but she denies preachiness. “I don’t give advice to anyone,” she insisted at the The Times bfi London Film Festival screening of Two Lovers. Except to Madonna, who she is “supporting in all the ways that I can”.

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