British prime minister David Cameron will be at the Olympic Park stadium today to watch a handball event with the French president, François Hollande. Britain does not take handball very seriously but it is highly popular on the continent and the French team won the gold medal at the Beijing Olympics four years ago.
Cameron and Hollande need a bit of Olympic distraction at the moment because relations between them are extremely strained. Hollande, very pointedly, rolled out the red carpet for the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, in Paris last week and the two men are working on a joint strategy to shift the emphasis away from austerity in both the eurozone and the UK.
Cameron, in contrast, is sticking to what Hollande dismisses as ‘Camerkozy’ economics, the approach adopted not only in Britain but also by the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
While Cameron himself is pretty safe in his job at the moment, the same cannot be said of his luckless chancellor, George Osborne. Leading Liberal Democrats like Lord Oakeshott, want Osborne replaced by the business minister, Vince Cable, and many Conservative backbenchers would also like to see him shifted.
Their choice, of course, would not be a Lib Dem like Cable but a more plausible and persuasive Conservative, such as the foreign secretary, William Hague.
Cameron is working on a cabinet reshuffle in the autumn but it is very unlikely that he will give in to the demands that Osborne be moved, even though a mere 19 per cent of voters in the latest opinion poll thought he should stay.
Ironically, while there is massive disillusionment with the coalition’s economic performance, the poll ratings on economic competence for Cameron and Osborne combined are still a shade ahead of those achieved by Ed Miliband and his shadow treasury minister, Ed Balls. It has to be said, however, that the ratings for both parties are extremely low.
Osborne is not the only senior cabinet minister besieged by doubts about his future role. The pressure on the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, is even greater and a strong lobbying movement is getting under way to shunt him off to a prestigious post in Brussels and replace him with Vince Cable, who is just about the only Lib Dem to have preserved his reputation in recent months.
If there was an Olympic gold medal for political opportunism, it would certainly be awarded to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who has taken advantage of his role in the host city to boost his long-term hope of becoming prime minister.
Johnson, of course, is not even an MP at the moment, which is in fact a considerable advantage for him because it leaves him free to roam around the Westminster landscape dipping in and out of popular causes such as a referendum on the EU without having to take dictates from the Conservative party spindoctors.
As a result, he has been able to distance himself from the numerous fiascos surrounding the games and instead glory in the applause of 60,000 revellers at a high profile event in Hyde Park.
Johnson has also taken the leading role in attacking Conservative critics of the opening ceremony, some of whom were irritated by the apparent support of ‘socialist’ causes like the national health service. One right-wing MP even denounced it for being too multicultural.
‘It wasn't global Brito-pap’, retorted Johnson. ‘It wasn't just Big Ben and Beefeaters and red buses and stuff. It was actually the truth about this country in the last 200 or 300 hundred years told in a big, dynamic way. People say it was all leftie stuff. That is nonsense. I'm a Conservative and I had hot tears of patriotic pride from the beginning. I was blubbing like Andy Murray.’
Although he has constantly said he will stay on as Mayor till 2016, most observers at Westminster expect Johnson to stand for parliament at the next general election a year before that.
Much to the embarrassment of David Cameron, the run-up to that election is likely to coincide with the high profile trials of several of his closest friends and colleagues over phone hacking and police corruption. Among those charged with conspiracy last week was Andy Coulson, the onetime News of the World editor whom Cameron controversially hired as his Downing Street head of communications.
There is now an extraordinary contrast between the series of problems in media handling encountered by the government and the self-assured performance of the spindoctors at Buckingham Palace.
They scored one of their greatest public relations triumphs ever on Friday night when they agreed to let the Queen, for the first time in her 60-year reign, play herself in a film. As a result, likewise for the first time, James Bond found himself reporting not to M but to Her M.