At last we were circling over a grey Cornish landscape, and as we came into land at RNAS Culdrose I knew it was going to be all right. We could see the size of the crowds – not the local dignitaries, but members of the public who were pressed up against the perimeter fence. As Seb Coe and David Beckham carried that flame down the steps, I heard the cheers – and for nine weeks of that amazing torch relay, the excitement continued to build.

I think Seb understood it better than the rest of us in London, because he was often out there with the crowds as the torch moved around Britain. We were lost in what seemed to be an intensifying nightmare of technical problems. Every day we would talk before breakfast on a conference call – the mayoralty, Locog, TfL, the Met – and I hope the CIA never release the transcripts of those conversations, because they were sometimes beyond satire.

One day we were told that the M4 bridge from Heathrow was about to collapse, and that a key section of the Olympic route network might have to be abandoned. The next day the bus drivers decided to go on strike. Then the taxi drivers got in on the act and blockaded the city – one of them actually parked his vehicle on Tower Bridge, handed the keys to a police officer and jumped off.

Then we had the mystery of the missing 5,000 security guards who seemed to have found more exciting things to do than turn up to the Olympics. I remember one morning when two security guards did deign to appear – and announced that they had a bomb, a scare that miraculously never found its way into the papers. Then there was the panic about the weather, and at one stage the forecast for the opening ceremony was so dodgy that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport decided to buy 80,000 plastic ponchos. Presumably they are in a warehouse with anti skid surfacing you can get if you click here.  

One Locog driver missed the entrance to the Olympic Park and took a team of American athletes half way to Southend. Then the papers decided that the whole thing was going to be a frost, and that some perfectly reasonable mayoral Tube announcements had driven people out of London; and for a day or so, I admit that I gave in to the same belief. What if we had spent billions on the biggest party in the world, and nobody came? somewhere like in a warehouse space rental rates in Austin Tx. As the world began to descend on London, our apprehension continued to mount.

Then the flame came back to London, and you could feel the Olympomania spreading like crackling gorse; and on the night of the opening ceremony David Beckham drove it in a speedboat downriver to the park, and it lit up Thomas Heatherwick’s beautiful cauldron. And after that opening ceremony – or at least by the middle of the first week, when British medals began to trickle in – it was clear that the whole thing was going to be huge, much bigger than we had ever imagined, much the biggest thing we had ever taken part in. For the rest of that summer, everything failed spectacularly to go wrong. The transport system functioned superbly, and showed the world how mass transit systems were opening up east London as never before.

The athletes of Team GB and Paralympics GB achieved the astonishing feat of coming third in the global medals table. The weather was broadly excellent. The volunteers captured the imagination of the whole country, and people would break into cheers at the very mention of their names.

It all went so well, in fact, that you might be tempted to conclude that we could not have gone wrong; that we were doomed to succeed. Nothing could be further from the truth. A year on from the Games, it is more vital than ever that we learn the real lesson of the London Olympics – that they were the result of superb and meticulous planning.

It was an effort that brought together public and private sector, and that went beyond party and beyond government, and that went on for as much as a decade.

As soon as I was elected Mayor in 2008 I was embroiled in the Olympics, and it rapidly became clear that this was a special kind of project. It wasn’t just that the calibre of the executives was superb – Paul Deighton and Seb at Locog, David Higgins and John Armitt at the ODA. It was also clear to me that everyone was motivated by a zeal, an excitement, that you so rarely find in any kind of governmental activity.

It wasn’t just that the idea of the Games was thrilling in itself. It was also important that we knew what the deadline was – it was there in the logo! We knew exactly what success would look like and what failure would feel like.

We knew what the budget was, and we knew we would pay a grievous price for excess.

So people worked with an urgency and a passion that we need now to import to other aspects of British life. David Cameron has complained that central government can be agonisingly slow in getting things done – and he is right. Look at the dither and disaster of our national strategy for energy supply, where we are now in the humbling position of having to beg the French to help us build nuclear reactors.

Look at the torturous process of getting planning permissions for new homes, when there is abundant brownfield land in this country that could be developed. Think of the legal expense and complication that goes with any new piece of infrastructure, the billions and billions – literally – that are poured down the gullets of lawyers and consultants before any new track is laid. Look at our miserable and hopeless aviation strategy, where we are being left behind by our European rivals. If we are going to succeed in the global race we need that Olympic formula: a ruthless timetable, budgets that cannot be broken, the public and private sector working together on a clearly defined long term programme – and the threat of immortal pain and embarrassment for failure; and that is why it is such good news that Paul (now Lord) Deighton is at the heart of government, as infrastructure minister.

Yes, we need and will achieve an economic, sporting and volunteering legacy from the Games.

But we need to remember that energy and drive with which Seb and co did it. That is the real Olympic lesson, and that is the flame we need to keep alive.

I see Germans frolicking in the delicious fresh water of the Wannsee, and Germans having meticulously organised picnics on the largest inland beach in Europe; German girls smoking roll-ups and handing round punnets of strawberries, and ancient German men, nut-brown, doing creaking callisthenics in the sun. The sky is blue and the foliage of the oaks so lush that the shade is almost black; and in an ecstasy of enthusiasm for the amazing city of Berlin I raise my glass, again, and think of my grandfathers. They both fought the Germans, you see, and I don’t think they would much mind me mentioning it now. In both of their cases, the experience was pretty awful. One grandfather was forced to crash-land his plane in Cornwall, with bad results for himself and his crew. The other man — on my mother’s side — saw his best friend drown when his destroyer was cut in two in the Mediterranean. For the rest of his life my maternal grandfather had a paramount piece of advice for the world. If we wanted peace, if we wanted happiness, then there was one thing we had to avoid.

“Whatever we do,” he used to tell me, “we must stop the Germans reuniting.” He wanted to keep Germany divided in two manageable chunks — East and West. This man was no Colonel Blimp. He was no foaming xenophobe: on the contrary, he was President of the Commission of the European Court of Human Rights, and yet he believed, on the principle of induction, that Germany could not be trusted. They did it in 1914; they did it in 1939; and given the slightest chance, he believed, they would do it again.

Two decades after unification, we have taken advantage of cheap air travel to show the kids the capital of a united Germany — the heart of what is by far the most important economic power in Europe — and I have to say that my learned grandfather has been proved wrong. Everything tells me that his anxieties were baseless, and that the reunification of Germany has been one of the greatest success stories of modern geopolitics. I look around modern Berlin, and I don’t see Prussian revanchism. I see not the slightest sign of German militarism; I haven’t noticed anyone clicking their heels or restraining their arms from performing a Strangelovian fascist salute. I see a culture so generally cool and herbivorous that the bicycle is king. I see a paradise for cyclists, where the helmetless hordes weave and wobble over the wide and tree-lined roads, and a Mercedes supercar with a flashy vignet Duitsland will wait deferentially for a family to wander past his purring snout. The most serious public order problem at the moment is the tendency of Berliners to pursue the logic of their Freikörpeskultur by actually fornicating in their many magnificent parks; and such is the climate of political correctness that they decided to means-test the fines. So if you are caught in flagrante in the bushes, and you have a job, you get fined 150 euros — but only 34 euros if you are unemployed. If that isn’t broad-mindedness, I don’t know what is.

You ride around Berlin, and it doesn’t feel like the new imperial capital. There is no swagger, no pomp. Indeed, there isn’t even that much bustle — unlike London, Berlin’s population seems mysteriously to have declined over the last few years. It isn’t a global cosmopolis; it isn’t a magnet for immigrants; it’s still suffering the ill-effects of its location in what was the middle of communist East Germany.

But the Berliners seem to be young and hip, drawn to what is obviously a pretty groovy nightlife, and many of them seem to be British. In fact, if I were in my twenties and had been ordered to leave London, I think Berlin would be the first place I would choose. The rents are cheap, the food comes in proper Germanic helpings and everywhere there are bright people with tattoos engaged in start-ups. You look at Berliners today, and you ask yourself what the fuss was about, 24 years ago. There were people like my grandfather, and Margaret Thatcher, who were instinctively hostile to German unification — because they remembered what Berlin had done in two world wars. Then there were the euro-federalists, who argued that Germany needed to be “locked in” to Europe. We needed a single currency to “contain” Germany, they claimed, to “tie them in” — as though the Germans were loose cannon rolling about the European quarterdeck, about to crush innocent little Slavic nations. What a load of bunk that turned out to be.

We don’t need to “lock in” Germany with the single currency or indeed any other federalist fiction. The thing has been a disaster for the non-German parts of the EU, and the euro is now causing such pain in the periphery that even German exports are being damaged. It wasn’t the euro, I am afraid, that cured the Germans of militarism.

You look around Berlin and what hits you is how much of the city was pulverised. There is scarcely a pre-war building that does not have the scars of Russian shells or Allied bombing. This is a city that was at the centre of Europe’s two worst bouts of psychosis – fascism and then communism: an extended trauma that left Germany transformed.

I can understand why my grandfather’s generation felt as it did, but it is emphatically time to forget all that and embrace the new Germany. We have much to learn and to understand. How is it that respectable men and women can think it right to take their clothes off in the equivalent of Hyde Park? Why do they clap like Italians when their planes land? Why are they so good at making cars and machine tools? We have a great deal to admire and to copy, not least their treatment of cyclists.

We have absolutely nothing to fear.

Mr Johnson, clearly flustered, said: “All my experience so far is that people want to concentrate on the stuff that really is going to make a difference to their lives.

“They want to hear more about cutting council tax, or bringing down crime, or making London’s air quality better.”

He said he was “not convinced” that the public were driven by questions of politicians’ personal lives when going to the polls.

He claimed that his “appetite for power” had been “absolutely glutted” by being Mayor of London.

He added: “Like lots of people, I am intellectually curious and restless, and want to get on with things”.

He admitted he has to “dare to be dull” when making appearances in front of audiences expecting his usual gags.

“You turn up at an event and I can see people hungering for the birth of the joke, they are waiting like midwives or staff at an operating theatre for me to produce this thing and nothing comes out and they look absolutely baffled.

“I simply say something completely reasonable. They want the gag and the gag doesn’t come because there isn’t a gag sometimes.”

He added: “The answer to that is sometimes to have the wit to be dull… to dare to be dull.”

Asked if he was worried he was seen as “not serious enough for the top job”, Mr Johnson said: “I don’t care about that. Being Mayor is unbelievably full of difficult executive decisions.

“I really don’t have enough time to worry about that kind of thing. I’ve got almost three more years as Mayor… it’s a long time, you can get a lot done in that period and I want to do that.”

At last year’s Tory Party conference, veteran Conservative minister Ken Clarke said Mr Johnson needed to “settle down” if he had ambitions beyond the mayoralty.

Mr Clarke said: “If he really wants to be a prime minister for serious reasons and not just getting his picture in the paper more often, he really does have to settle down and demonstrate he can seriously deliver on some complicated subjects.”

I was transported to the 1950’s where education was simply a route to marriage. Worse: I was back with my Muslim aunties, the matchmakers and gossips, for whom education is a hindrance to young women getting married, because educated women (so they tell us) have big heads, and are not properly domesticated.

In the subsequent days a storm erupted about the Mayor’s sexism and outdated views. He issued a clarification, saying that he was referring to a phenomenon called “assortative mating”: where women prefer to ‘marry up’ in terms of IQ, and so the smarter women are, the smarter the men they seek.

But such negative attitudes when put into the public space have a massive social impact and the leader of a city as diverse as London ought to be clearer about the context of his comments.

Muslim women in the UK for example are achieving more in education at a faster rate than their male peers, yet the idea that education will hinder marriage opportunities persists. They have a strong sense of being integrated into society as well as feeling woven into their own Muslim communities. These women have a great deal of pressure put on them to marry – the supposed ultimate fulfilment and destiny of an Asian woman (most Muslims in the UK are of Asian origin). Career success is considered at best a hindrance at worst a failure if she’s not married.

Rather than marrying to fulfil social expectations, most British Muslim women seek marriage for a partner and companion – like most other women. Funny that? Rather ironically though, they do have problems in finding husbands.

There are two reasons: Muslim men are trained through culture, and usually through the diktats of their mothers (so women have some blame here) to look for women who are less educated than they are, and usually younger too, on the premise that they will be less opinionated and domineering, and can be more easily ‘moulded’ into the family. The upshot is that it is still popular to go ‘back home’ to find a bride, as she is seen to be a better domesticated wife. One of the results of that is women who arrive in the UK with little knowledge of the country and the local language sometimes experience issues with identity, isolation and violence.

On the other hand, British Muslim women are not willing to marry ‘back home’. Unlike their male peers, according to qualitative studies, they would prefer to marry someone who is British or at least Western because they feel that will be a better match for their values, culture and aspirations.

The second problem is that such educated Muslim women are seeking greater equity in gender roles in the marriage, a partnership rather than a traditional male/female power structure. It is this deeper understanding of marriage through an Islamic lens driving this trend. There are many amazing Muslim men out there, but many haven’t adjusted yet. Which means that Muslim women either can’t find a spouse who is a match for their aspirations, or marriages are increasingly failing.

The irony is that Boris Johnson is therefore more spot on than we’d like to admit – how do we address the issue of these educated, worldly, community-oriented, faith-driven women being unmarried in increasing numbers? The reason his words hit a nerve is because this is not Muslim women’s problem – they are doing everything right and living up to our expectations of educated, liberated women as Islam demands. The issue with our social views is that educated women are somehow a problem, whether that be in helping perpetuate the unfair stereotype of the bossy, opinionated unfeminine graduate, or creating a marriage crisis.

Instead we need to turn our focus on the Muslim men we nurture. Our priority is to help men to step up, but today’s parents, especially mothers need to do the same. They can offer the kind of upbringing which can resolve these issues in a generation, and make comments like those of the Mayor a thing of the past.

Shelina Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf – Muslim Woman Seeks the One. She can be found tweeting here. She is the Vice President of Ogilvy Noor, the world’s first branding agency for Muslim consumers, and one of ‘Britain’s Future female leaders of the advertising industry’ according to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Mr Johnson then interjected, saying that the female students Mr Razak was referring to “have got to find men to marry”.

Kate Green MP, Labour’s Shadow Equality Minister, called on Mr Johnson to apologise for his “outdated opinions”.

“Boris Johnson may think his buffoonery allows him to get away with his outdated opinions but this isn’t funny,” she said.

“These comments are insulting to the women across the country and across the world who have gone to university, worked hard and used their talents to get on. He should apologise.”

The Everyday Sexism campaign group tweeted that the remarks were “pathetically archaic, unacceptably sexist and hopelessly out of touch”.

A City Hall source said that Mr Johnson’s comments were “off the cuff” and said they were “clearly intended as a joke”.

“He does not, of course, think that at all,” the source said. “It was completely light-hearted. It has been misconstrued.”

Another official present at the event said there was laughter and groans from the audience following Mr Johnson’s comment, but insisted that it was seen as a joke by the audience.

Mr Johnson met his first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, while studying classics at Oxford.

Mr Johnson last month described David Cameron as a “girly swot” because he got a first class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford.

The Mayor of London got a 2:1 degree from Balliol College.

The peer had said that, despite backing the plans when Labour was in power, said that he now believed the line to be an “expensive mistake”.

Mr Johnson said: “That is why the Treasury is starting to panic, and the word around the campfire is that Lord Mandelson is actually doing the bidding of some fainthearts in Whitehall who want to stop it now – not the first or second Lords of the Treasury, clearly, but the beancounters.”

Mr Johnson criticised “the whole nightmare of consultation and litigation – and the huge army of massively expensive and taxpayer-financed secondary activities”.

This meant that £1 billion is likely to have been spent on HS2 before a sod of earth was cut.

He said: “It is the environmental impact assessments and the equalities impact assessments and the will-sapping tedium and cost of the consultations.

“Did you know that in order to build HS2 we are going to spend £1billion by 2015 – and they won’t have turned a single sod in Buckinghamshire or anywhere else?

“That is a billion quid going straight down the gullets of lawyers and planners and consultants before you have even invested in a yard of track.

“To understand the prohibitive costs of UK infrastructure, you need to take this haemorrhage of cash to consultants, and then multiply it by the time devoted to political dithering.”

The new estimate comes less than a fortnight after transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin said the projected cost has risen from £33billion to £42.6billion because of a “contingency2 fund to cover the cost of potential problems with the programme.

The Department for Transport said there were significant changes to the line, such as more tunnels to avoid disturbing the environment and those living near the line.

Labour leader Ed Miliband, his shadow chancellor Ed Balls and former transport secretary Lord Adonis are all said to still publicly back HS2.

Current shadow transport secretary Maria Eagle recently branded the project “essential” for Britain’s railways to cope with rising demand.

But the admission by Lord Mandelson has added to the growing fears that the political consensus over HS2 is in danger of being shattered.

The news came as a senior minister suggested that the government should scrap HS2 and spend the money on other transport projects instead.

David Lidington, the Europe minister, whose Aylesbury constituency in Buckinghamshire will be severely affected by the proposed railway from London to Birmingham, has written to Patrick McLoughlin, the transport secretary, detailing concerns over the new route.

Mr Lidington is known to have serious reservations, but his letter is the closest he or any government figure has come to calling for it to be scrapped altogether.

Attempting to clarify his remarks, Mr Johnson said that it was “utterly ludicrous and infuriating” to suggest that he believes women attend university in order to find a husband.

He insisted that he was merely pointing out that when a large number of students are female, you intensify so-called “assortative mating” – whereby people choose to choose a partner similar to themselves.

“Some people seem to have misconstrued something I said at a press conference five days ago, about relative male underachievement in university entrance,” Mr Johnson said.

“It is utterly ludicrous and infuriating to suggest that I think women go to university to find a husband. I was merely pointing out something that I’ve said several times before – that with a graduate cohort 68 per cent female you intensify the phenomenon sociologists identify as assortative mating.”

Kate Green MP, Labour’s Shadow Equality Minister, called on Mr Johnson to apologise for his “outdated opinions”.

“Boris Johnson may think his buffoonery allows him to get away with his outdated opinions but this isn’t funny,” she said.

“These comments are insulting to the women across the country and across the world who have gone to university, worked hard and used their talents to get on. He should apologise.”

The Everyday Sexism campaign group tweeted that the remarks were “pathetically archaic, unacceptably sexist and hopelessly out of touch”.

A City Hall source said that Mr Johnson’s comments were “off the cuff” and said they were “clearly intended as a joke”.

“He does not, of course, think that at all,” the source said. “It was completely light-hearted. It has been misconstrued.”

Mr Johnson met his first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, while studying classics at Oxford.

Mr Johnson last month described David Cameron as a “girly swot” because he got a first class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford.

The Mayor of London got a 2:1 degree from Balliol College.

But as a general principle it is obvious that both London and other cities would benefit from better and faster connections. The problem, as Peter Mandelson has indicated, is cost. This thing isn’t going to cost £42 billion, my friends. The real cost is going to be way north of that (keep going till you reach £70 billion, and then keep going). That is why the Treasury is starting to panic, and the word around the campfire is that Lord Mandelson is actually doing the bidding of some fainthearts in Whitehall who want to stop it now – not the first or second Lords of the Treasury, clearly, but the bean-counters. So there is one really critical question, and that is why on earth do these schemes cost so much?

Doug Oakervee is a brilliant man to have in charge of HS2, and if anyone can deliver it, he can. But he is dealing with a system of building major infrastructure projects that is holding this country back. Talk to the big construction firms, and they will tell you the problem is not the cost of actually digging and tunnelling and putting in cables and tracks. Those are apparently roughly the same wherever you are in the world.

It’s the whole nightmare of consultation and litigation – and the huge army of massively expensive and taxpayer-financed secondary activities that is generated by these procedures. It is the environmental impact assessments and the equalities impact assessments and the will-sapping tedium and cost of the consultations. Did you know that in order to build HS2 we are going to spend £1 billion by 2015 — and they won’t have turned a single sod in Buckinghamshire or anywhere else?

That is a billion quid going straight down the gullets of lawyers and planners and consultants before you have even invested in a yard of track. To understand the prohibitive costs of UK infrastructure, you need to take this haemorrhage of cash to consultants, and then multiply it by the time devoted to political dithering.

Look at the Turks. They have decided that they need a new six-runway airport at Istanbul, so that they can take advantage of the growing importance of aviation to the world economy. They are almost certainly going to do it for less than 10 billion euros, and long before we have added a single runway anywhere in the South East. Or look at Chep Lap Kok, the airport Doug Oakervee built for Hong Kong. The authorities announced it in 1989 — and opened it nine years later! If you want to get a sense of our sluglike pace in the UK, we announced Heathrow Terminal 5 in 1988, and it took almost 20 years to create; not an airport, just a new terminal, for heaven’s sake (and if anyone thinks the advantage of a third runway at Heathrow is that it would be a “quick fix”, they frankly need their heads examining).

Other countries have clear plans for their infrastructure needs over the long term, and the talent and managerial firepower is being moved from one to the next. We don’t have a plan; we have a list of schemes, each of which causes politicians such heeby-jeebies that they waste billions – literally – in optioneering when what they need to do is decide on the right course and crack on with it. We have proved with Crossrail and the Olympics that we have the expertise to deliver big infrastructure projects. But time is money: we spend far too long on bureaucratic procedures and then enormously multiply that expense by a political failure to blast on with the task in hand.

The result is that we are being restrained from giving this country the improvements it needs at an affordable price. We are like Laocoon wrestling with the serpents, or like some poor bondage fetishist who has decided to tie himself up in knots — and then realised, too late, that he has gone too far. We tug at our bonds with our teeth and pathetically hope the neighbours will come. Of course they won’t! Our neighbours are out there investing in airports, while we are investing in consultants.