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» Friday, July 1, 2005

Olympic Singapore

The Prime Minister's Official Spokesman (PMOS) said a few words about the UK bid for the 2012 Olympics. He said that we had to recognise that this had been a highly competitive bid. On the other hand it had been a great honour to compete and Seb Coe had led a very very good bid. That had been recognised by the evaluation report on the 6 June. We still believed there was all to play for, we were going flat out at Singapore for the final pitch at putting our case and that was what we would do. In Singapore there were two different elements. There was what you could set up in advance and what you could do, to use a technical term, on the hoof. In terms of what we had set up in advance the Prime Minister would, over the course of Monday and Tuesday be meeting between 20 and 30 IOC members for one-to-one meetings. He would also, as would Mrs. Blair, be meeting as many others as possible, at various receptions and so on. In terms of the case we would be putting, we would obviously be pointing to the very strong technical nature of our bid, the legacy that it would leave to sport here, stressing the multi-cultural nature of London and the welcome that athletes would receive in London, but also that this bid was not just restricted to London. Finally we would point to the fact that there was real strong substantial support, as Tessa Jowell said at Cabinet yesterday, for the bid. 80% of people in London and 75% in the UK as a whole, 2.5 million people had gone to the bother of registering their support at the 2012 website and text message service. We were going flat out and by the end of the week we might well be flat out, with exhaustion, but we were going for it.

Briefing took place at 11:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (0)

Climate Change

Asked where we were on climate change, the PMOS said that we were where we thought we would be. Negotiations were still going on, they were serious negotiations. Precisely because they were serious negotiations we would not give a running commentary despite stories which attempted to say where we were, as he had anticipated there would be. It was far better to simply put our heads down and recognise that what mattered was what we emerged with next Friday.

Briefing took place at 11:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (2)

Live 8

Asked if there would be any Prime Ministerial participation in Live 8, the PMOS said that clearly the Prime Minister supported Live 8. The physical manifestation of that was his appearance on MTV yesterday alongside Bob Geldof.

Briefing took place at 11:00 | Read whole briefing | Comment (1)

EU

Asked for a reaction to Mr Borroso's comparison of the EU to a boxing championship, the PMOS said that all he could talk about was our approach. Our approach to the summit had been to set out what we believed was not just our national interest, in terms of the rebate, but also Europe's interest in terms of getting a budget which more accurately reflected the needs of Europe as it was today rather than as it was 40 years ago. The reception that the Prime Minister's speech received throughout Europe indicated that there was a consensus in Europe about the need for e proper debate on those issues. We were not claiming that everyone agreed with our position on the rebate. What people did recognise was that we were right to say that there needed to be a debate and that the Prime Minister's speech was an important contribution to starting that debate. What we wanted to do in the Presidency was take that debate forwards and that we would do. He did not see anything in President Borroso's comments that argued against that, indeed quite the reverse. Asked what the President's intentions might have been in making such comments, the PMOS said that Mr Borroso would speak for himself. However it was clear that he was a strong supporter of reform. He had to reflect the reviews and he did reflect the views of Europe as a whole. Equally as he had clearly stated there was a need for Europe to reform to meet the objective that Europe had set itself of becoming a truly competitive economy in the era of globalisation. We supported those views.

Briefing took place at 11:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (0)

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