HARRINGTON last week lamented the loss of Dawn Foster’s campaign­ing voice, three years on from the journalist’s death at just 33.

The start of the Olympics in Paris today (Friday) reminds me of the column which apparently led to the Guardian freaking out and deciding not to run her stuff any more.

The piece perfectly ridiculed the then deputy Labour leader and now peer Lord Tom Watson, and his endlessly self-serving life in politics. You’ll all have your own stories about how at some stage he has made you cringe, but we’ll leave those for another day.

“Centrist thinking is focused on two false premises,” Dawn wrote in that final article for the Guardian.

“The first is that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives. The second is that the UK became divided by Brexit and the 2016 vote, rather than it being a symptom of long-term problems.”

Watson and Brexit aside, how refreshing it was for somebody to articulate how so many people get lost into thinking the summer of 2012 was some golden time for us all just because Mo Farah won a race and you enjoyed Kenneth Branagh on full main character duty, dressed up as Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Make no mistake, the Olympics was a special time of sporting achievement, paired with a feelgood refreshment through the city.

But it became a form of sacrilege to criticise the London games in any way. We had to show the world we were the best at handling such occasions, and anybody who veered from this narrative was seen a spoilsport.

Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony was indeed a spectacle, but another example nevertheless of how the NHS and nurses are rewarded with doorstep claps; here was a chance for them to feel lucky they were in the stadium (see picture) telling the UK’s story. Just don’t ask for a rise.

Those Olympics are not remembered now for how people on low incomes struggled to get tickets because if you were interested in getting one you had to pledge big money in a ballot stacked in favour of those with the most resources.

It’s not remembered how then, for almost the whole first week, people locked out due to economic circumstance had to watch events take place in half-empty stadiums.

There was an embarrassing moment when Lord Seb Coe said, in a way only somebody as privileged as he is could, that the venues were “stuffed to the gunwales” ­­­– as we saw army personnel called in to fill the seats.

As long as there were enough emotional montages set to stringy music like Elbow’s One Day, then we could forget about how London was reordered into a two-tier traffic system with the “Games Lanes” so that a lot of not very important sponsors could race to where they wanted to, while the rest of us were stuck on the top deck of a trail of non-moving buses.

Forget how Britain’s oldest black newspaper, The Voice, was blocked from covering the events.

Forget a rash of corporate tie-ins with some awful firms from worlds which clashed with the Olympic ethos.

Forget the kid being thrown off his BMX by some security big heads because he went slightly too close to the flame on its way to Stratford.

Forget the missed opportunity to really help people living in that part of east London, rather than simply make it another place too expensive to call home, and forget the failed follow-up to get young people interested in any sport that isn’t football.

You probably haven’t watched any swimming, rowing or athletics since the last Olympics, despite being an armchair expert on 2012’s “super Saturday”.

But perhaps the biggest shame, and Dawn wrote this in a much more grown-up and serious way than Harrington can, is the refusal to countenance any discussion on how an unlimited budget for the Games was found while all around the country people were living in poverty.

It was some outrageous offence to mention the gargantuan cost, even though for the other 50 weeks of that year we read stories about painful destitution.

Just play Elbow some more. Show us Jessica Ennis, and the Judo woman we loved, and the Taekwondo one.

It was a time when we were told austerity was the only way and we couldn’t afford anything, a bit like Rachel Reeves and the self-imposed “fiscal rules” which say the new Labour government cannot afford to lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty by scrapping the heartless two-child benefit cap. This, of course, was said once more this week ­– the same week when it was agreed £50million would be given to the royals to do up Buckingham Palace, alongside some extra pocket money for two new helicopters.

When governments really want to buy something they do, just right now it’s not dinner for hungry children.