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Ken Livingstone walked into the lobby of the Swissotel in Singapore on the afternoon of July 7, 2005, carrying a shopping bag.

The former London Mayor should have been in a relaxed mood. He'd been celebrating in the vote for the 2012 Olympics until the early hours of the morning and had spent a relaxing day in the heat of Singapore, seven hours ahead of the UK.

Livingstone caught my eye as I was chatting and joking with Simon Clegg, the former chief executive of the British Olympic Association. The Mayor pulled Clegg aside and whispered something in his ear. It was only a few words but the former Army Major's face went very serious and Livingstone walked off briskly towards the lifts.

Clegg turned to me and said simply: "There's been an incident in London."

Within an hour of that moment, the mood in the lobby of the hotel changed from the euphoria of London's victory to despair.

Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell had been sitting with journalists having a cup of tea and talking about the celebratory helicopter ride which was being planned over the Olympic site when the bid team returned to London.

She was soon taken aside by her aides and was briefed about the reports coming back from London.

I raced up to my hotel room for half an hour to see what ´óÏó´«Ã½ World was reporting from London. It soon became clear that the city had been hit by coordinated bombings.

By the time I returned to the lobby, it was full of athletes and officials from the bid team, talking about their worries about London. Many simply couldn't believe what was happening.

Just a few hours previously, they had been at a open-air party at a Singapore restaurant watching TV pictures of the wild celebrations at Waterloo Station and Trafalgar Square. There had been so much pride in the bid team in pulling off a victory which meant so much at home.

Britain had hardly had time to enjoy the historic moment when it was dealing with a disaster. Rarely in the history of London has such sadness followed on so quickly from such joy.

I spent the next hours reporting the reaction from Singapore for my former newspaper, the Evening Standard. All the stories I had filed about London's celebrations for the early editions were ripped up and we started again with a newspaper with a completely different mood.

Then Livingstone returned to the lobby for the first time. He was immediately surrounded by scores of TV cameramen. The Mayor had been in his hotel room for several hours coordinating London's response to the bombings by phone.

During a colourful career, the Labour politician has sometimes uttered the wrong words and got into trouble because of it. But on this desperate day, the Mayor produced the finest speech of his life.

Clearly shaking with a mixture of anger and nerves, he said: "I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.

"That isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted faith - it is just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other. I said yesterday to the International Olympic Committee, that the city of London is the greatest in the world, because everybody lives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved and that is why I'm proud to be the mayor of that city."

2012's team headed back to a very different London to the one they had left. That day is often in the minds of officials as they prepare security for the Olympics.

of every Games since the terrorist attack on the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Despite 7/7, the Olympic world doesn't worry about the Games taking place in London any more than it would, had Paris or New York been given the event.

Strict security has been part of the Games for decades now. London will be no different.

But the memory of those 24 hours in Singapore will be in the minds of all of us who experienced them for the rest of our lives.