Even as the Olympics lit up the nation, we were already on the path to disaster

How did we get from the Olympics to this? It has been a howl of exasperation issued somewhere, by someone, at some point, probably hourly since the EU referendum result poisoned the national mood overnight. More recently, it has prompted a certain degree of London 2012 revisionism. That in fact, even by that high summer of unsurpassed joy, the country was already set on its path to ruin.

The politics of austerity had been set in motion. David Cameron and George Osborne’s plan, of delivering the most brutal cuts to the parts of the country that were in the deepest need, on the grounds that they would never vote Conservative anyway, had begun. Osborne was booed at the Paralympics, specifically for policies that had vicious consequences on people with disabilities. Ironically, one of the official sponsors of the games was Atos, the same multinational outsourcing corporation that had been hired to do the government’s already notorious work capability assessments – making disabled people prove they were disabled in unimaginably demeaning ways, or else lose their benefits.

It also cannot be ignored that other triumphs of those wondrous weeks have not aged well. When Mo Farah passed the Olympic flame on the final lap of his 5,000m, and started to pick up the pace, reining in all before him, I have never heard a noise like it. Sports press boxes can be quite pious places. They are multinational, and in theory, strictly non-partisan. Cheering is frowned upon. When Farah crossed the line, amid an arrow shower of air-punching, I saw one or two in tears of joy. The purity of that moment is now gone. Sir Mo’s coach, Alberto Salazar, has been suspended for four years over doping allegations. Questions hang in the air, and they hang because they have not been satisfactorily answered.