HAVE you seen that monstrosity that is going to disgrace the London skyline for the 2012 Olympics?

It’s a 120 metre high steel tower sculpture that has been designed by the Turner Prize winning artist Anish Kapoor that looks like a Meccano construction gone wrong.

Works that have won the Turner Prize in the past include lights going on and off in an empty room, a 60 minute video of a group of actors dressed as police officers standing still and saying nothing, and elephant dung, so they should have known.

This is a saggy tower with a restaurant on top. If they’d wanted a restaurant, I'm sure McDonalds would have obliged. It would have looked better and wouldn’t have cost anywhere near £19 million, the bulk of which is being donated by steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Europe, who lives in London.

What a nice altruistic chap, you might think. Except that the tower is going to be named after him so it will be a sort of 120 metre ego.

London mayor Boris Johnson talked Lakshmi into stumping up the loot and he’s happy with the proposed result. He says of the planned sculpture: "He has taken the idea of a tower and transformed it into a piece of modern British art. It would have boggled the minds of the Romans. It would have boggled Gustave Eiffel."

The Romans, who knew a thing or two about art and construction, would have had the designer shot from a ballista, and Gustave would have been puzzled.

“You need stronger steel,” he would have said. “the stuff you're using is all bendy and looks daft.”

Kapoor the artist says: "It's a long winding spiral: a folly that aspires to go even above the clouds and has something mythic about it."

It's a folly, all right. A £19 million folly of egos.