Exposed: the nightmare of the London Olympics

It will be our own fault, hinted John Yates on Monday, when he resigned as Assistant Commissioner of the Met. "Inaccurate, ill-informed and, on occasion, downright malicious gossip," he said, "had the potential to be a significant distraction in my role as the national lead for counter-terrorism."

We know what that means. Bloody journos. Hysterical bloody MPs. Irresponsible bollocks. The hidden rebuke: if it all goes tits-up at the 2012 Olympics and the phony corporate fol-de-rols out in London's eastern edgelands is covered with a pall of smoke or a spray of blood and screams, we only have ourselves to blame.

He may have a point. A couple of counter-terrorism people, long before the Murdoch Affair hit the newsstands, fingered Yates as a good bloke. More than a good bloke; a crucial bloke, who should be left to get on with his job. Biggest security operation in Britain's history, is the deal. Too much at stake for luxurious scruple-mongering.
 
But when the major spin-off of the Olympics is a record-busting security effort, we might ask whether the thing hasn't already gone terribly wrong, and there's nothing AC Yates or his successor can do about it.

Occupying the extreme outposts of that position – that it went tits-up at the very outset, just that we haven't yet heard the bang – is one of the most extraordinary writers of our time: the great London psycho-geographer Iain Sinclair.
 
Sinclair's a man who writes neither fiction nor fact, nor yet some in-between mish-mash, but something which goes beyond either. His new book Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project is his angriest and most meticulous yet, a relentless condemnation, precisely observed and minutely documented, of the fixing and trimming, the cheating and skimming and thieving and fudging, the offshore-milking, status-boosting, self-serving mendacity of the whole damnable Olympics project.

Legislating against human territory, fencing off poisoned land, a smokescreen of "respectability for oligarchs, arms dealers and corrupt statesmen," the Olympic "grand project" is, for Sinclair, a nightmare of mad vainglory. He dissects it in a splintered, glittering prose quite inimitable by anyone. Nobody can sever a sentence like Sinclair, so that both sides of the cut grow sudden teeth and snap at you.

If there's anything definable as virtuoso British writing of the last half-century – and there is – then Sinclair's the man behind it. He brings J G Ballard to a honed edge that slices to the bone. His endlessly fertile re-inventions of the English language far overleap the often pointless rhetoric of Martin Amis. Amis's tics, all catalogued in the seventeenth-century rhetoricians' handbooks, exist to draw attention to themselves and paper over the pedestrian thumps and shrugs of narrative.

Sinclair is a genius. Specifically, a genius loci, the spirit of the place. This place being London. Specifically London's "edgelands". This time it's Hackney and the poisoned wells of Newham. Blue fences. Security goons in high-vis tabards. Blokes with clipboards. Buy-to-let artists. Leveraged non-doms. Bungs and drinks, PowerPoint and PR-polished proposals, the humanity and sense buffed out of them by smooth operators with nice weekend places in the Cotswolds.

He bemoans the loss of humanity. "Allotments. Prefabs. Tower blocks. Steamed-up, all-day-breakfast caffs. Launderettes." He mourns what's gone: "Fly-by-night enterprises and abortive pastoral relics. Industrial hoists. Football pitches. A cycle track. A river shared by oarsmen, narrowboat dwellers, dog-walkers, wanderers who were not filmed, not challenged by security, trusted to make their own mistakes."

Instead, he sees "toxic blight . . . all around, the ghost milk of dying industries," and who doesn't thrill with righteous rage at his surgical dissection of "bankers with heavy bellies, advocates of fiscal alchemy, let them dance on hot coals and wade, up to the chin, in tides of their own excrement."

The whole debacle of Murdoch pere et fils, of Brooks and Cameron and Coulson and the plods and functionaries and hapless suburban gumshoes currently being fingered by the opportunistic press and politicians, none of us any better than we should be: all this is foreshadowed, and distilled into its quintessence, in this astounding exercise in sustained rage – a rage he himself observes with the strange ethical delight of an ancient Roman, collecting wonders.

Robbie Burns, over two centuries ago, warned that "A chiel 's amang ye takin' notes / And feth he'll prent it."

Iain Sinclair's that chiel. And, faith, he's printed it. It may be on the surface about the mad folly of the Olympics; but, really, Ghost Milk is the real News of the World.

• Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair, Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 978-0241144350 ·