The chaotic scenes surrounding the Olympic torch relay through London as anti-China protestors tried to disrupt the event have damaged the reputation of the Olympic movement, according to a senior Kent Conservative MP.

Hugh Robertson, the shadow sports minister and Faversham and Mid Kent MP, said the protests during the relay were inevitable but could have been limited had Gordon Brown stopped the torch from passing Downing Street.

Mr Robertson said: "I think the television pictures will have left people feeling a bit uneasy and wondering if the Olympic ideals are quite as pure as they are made out to be.

"These scenes were inevitable once the IOC decided to give the Games to Beijing. Once that decision was made, it was always going to make it difficult to make the Olympics about sport and not politics."

Politics was now "part of the DNA" of the Beijing games, he added.

In the circumstances, there was little alternative to the having security minders and police officers flanking the runners, he added. "There was the right number of police and I think they got the balance about right.

"I suspect there was a better solution and that was to send it on a shorter route and not send it to Downing Street."

He said organisers of the London games needed to ensure that by 2012, the focus was on sport.

"When the games come to us, we have to puncture this whole Olympic belief that it is about an economic jamboree and bring it back to 17 days of world class sport," he stressed.