Paris Mayor Hits Out at Blair and Coe

The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, has fired another French broadside at London's successful 2012 Olympic campaign by accusing the prime minister Tony Blair and the head of the bid Sebastian Coe of breaking International Olympic Committee rules by criticising their rivals.

Blair had angered the Paris bidders by meeting with members of the IOC, and yesterday Delanoe accused him and Lord Coe of breaching a "formal ban on criticising other candidates. They crossed the line with respect to the IOC rules," he said. On Saturday the IOC president Jacques Rogge cleared Blair of acting improperly.

The London 2012 Olympic brand is to be protected from unauthorised exploitation in new legislation, the government has confirmed. The Olympic bill, which will be published formally on Thursday before a second reading debate a week today, forms a central part of the capital's plan to hold the games.

It will establish the Olympic Delivery Authority, the organisation that will oversee the construction of new facilities in east London. It will also regulate the security, logistics and budget of the games before handing them on to a separate organisation which will run the actual event.

The legislation will also safeguard the 2012 logo and act against ticket touts attempting to sell Olympic tickets. Currently ticket tout offences are only applicable to football matches.

Both government and opposition spokesmen emphasised that they wanted to get the legislation on to the statute book as quickly as possible. However, parliament's long summer break, which begins next week, means that the bill will not be able to complete its passage before the autumn. Until then urgent work on the Olympic plan will be handled by the London Development Agency and Transport for London.

The minister responsible for the Olympics, Tessa Jowell, yesterday made her first appearance in the Commons since London won the bid last Wednesday and she came under immediate fire from the shadow culture secretary Theresa May, who criticised the impact of government action on small sports clubs prior to the games. Dismissing the criticism, Jowell restated the importance of the games.

"It is much more than an infrastructure project - building new facilities for the East End of London that will serve for decades to come - it has nothing short of the power to transform the ambitions of young people up and down our country," she said.