I am lost. The right-hand lane is for VIPs, the left for buses, the middle for marathon runners. No, the right one is for black BMWs and the left for corporate sponsors. Or is the left for Lord Coe and Sepp Blatter, the right for missile launchers and the middle for girls with almost nothing on?

Is it true that no one will be allowed on the Tube without an Olympics ticket and passengers on the No 11 bus must remove their shoes? Will anyone drinking a Pepsi or carrying an Apple Mac within the advertising exclusion zone really be detained by the police? Are non-conforming tattoos really being banned and unsponsored urinals being shut?

Can the Olympics still be rescued from this garbage? Whatever I thought about blowing £9 billion on a month of sport, I always believed the London Games would be ready on time and would pass off quietly. We can do that. So why have Locog and Whitehall between them gone barking mad?

There was no “traffic chaos” in Sydney, Athens or Beijing, because no one not on expenses or hospitality went near them. In London, tourist block bookings are reported to be 90 per cent down for August and hotels are 30 per cent empty. There is no shred of evidence for the claim by Boris Johnson and the Government that the capital will see “a million extra visitors” during August and not be able to cope. There is no reason for everyone else to get the hell out.

London workers have been told for the past six months to stay away during the Games. They should take a holiday, work from home, telecommute, come in only when “essential”. Courts will be sitting late in special sessions, presumably to cope with riots or terrorist outrage. Hospitals will be unable to handle non-emergency cases and are reserving special supplies of blood. Heathrow has a special “Olympics” terminal for those with tickets to avoid threatened immigration queues.

To portray London as being in a state of panic is hugely damaging to a city already battered by recession. I gather London’s chambers of commerce recently protested to the Mayor, pointing out that telling workers to stay at home would only add to the recession and the collapse in normal tourism. It would cripple services such as shops, restaurants and pubs. Theatres are already cutting performances. London is threatened with a major, government-induced recession.

The Mayor’s response was to warn businesses “not to get caught out” — by what? The Tube is festooned with stay-away signs.

London can handle crowds. People make some nine million daily journeys on London’s public transport, road and rail. Stratford is expected to receive no more than 300,000 spectators, staggered throughout the day, and the rest of London hardly more than 200,000. This is far fewer than big demonstrations and events in Hyde Park. Even this pressure will be more than relieved by the anticipated fall in non-Olympic visitors and Londoners on holiday.

I will eat my hat if London is overwhelmed next month. It is more likely to be empty, a ghost city and chronically starved of customers. If the royal Jubilee cost Britain £1 billion for a day off work, the cost of closing down the capital for an entire month must surely double the direct cost of holding the Games. Insofar as there is turbulence it will be due to Locog’s inexcusable demand that the Mayor give its VIPs and sponsors private lanes and green light phases, excluding from them even London’s taxis and buses. These lanes must be vulnerable to mass infringement by irate motorists. Why the International Olympic Committee “family” cannot use the new railway to Stratford from St Pancras, which it demanded London build for its use, is a mystery.

So why did the Mayor, Transport for London and the Department for Culture tell us to avoid the capital, as if it were to be hit by bubonic plague, leading to a mass stayaway by foreign tourists? Even the tourism authorities, browbeaten into hyping the Games for the past year, have been reduced to suggesting that perhaps the “tourism boost” will come in later years instead. The Mayor should have a vested interest in attracting visitors, not deterring them, and every interest in supporting the London economy, not undermining it.

David Cameron last week claimed to know that Britain “will make

£13 billion” from the Olympics. This figure is apparently reached by adding a billion from “extra” tourism —inconceivable — to profits from consultancy and construction contracts “to do with building future Olympics”.

This is the sort of wishful thinking we used to ridicule in Mao’s China. Was the figure seen by a reputable economist and will anyone ever audit it? Olympic Games cost irrecoverable money. Everyone knows it, except those whose contracts from Locog and Whitehall require them to say the opposite. The biggest casualty from this fake optimism, that the Games will be “the most secure ever”, has already met its first Waterloo. By overloading the security budget, Locog has predictably come a cropper, facing the absurdity of troops manning the fences and entrances as in a banana republic.

As the great day approaches, the contrast is glaring between this noise and the eagerness of young athletes shown on the BBC’s excellent Olympic Dreams programme. The lesson of the Queen’s Jubilee, which saw more people crowd into central London than will do so during the Olympics, is that London is best kept informal, calm and low-key.

London, its citizens and businesses, have been shut out of the Olympics by a wall of security and commercialism. The idyll that captivated Tony Blair, of skimpily clad maidens playing beach volleyball on Horse Guards Parade, has degenerated into a parody of Guantánamo Bay. But the commitment of theatres, concert halls and museums has been impressive, witness Shakespeare at the Globe and British design at the V&A.

Londoners are paying dearly for hosting the Games, and must have some pleasure from the occasion. No one wants the London Games to fail. But everything now depends on the athletes. Theirs is now the task of rescuing the Olympic image and redeeming what must surely be the last Games staged with such extravagance.