Yes, folks, I mean BP the oil giant; the same BP that in April 2010 was jointly responsible for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, in which 11 people died and which resulted in a four-month submarine geyser of oil — a hideous splurge of hydrocarbons that polluted hundreds of miles of the Louisiana coast. Tourism was blitzed. Oysters, shrimps, crabs, turtles, dolphins, seals — an entire beautiful ecosystem was tainted with that oily slick.

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That is a colossal sum, and it could affect the very viability of the company; and you should not imagine that such a fine would be cost-free for the UK as a whole. A lot of our pension funds have traditionally invested in BP shares, and if BP shares go down then that is bad news for UK pensioners and a tremendous thwack on the mazzard for UK plc. According to the oil company, such a fine would be wildly disproportionate to the damage inflicted. The BP honchos claim that things are much better on the coast of Louisiana, that sea water and microbes have done a good job in breaking down the oil (which is, after all, a naturally occurring substance), and that tourism and other trades are recovering.

That may or may not be true — it’s what you would expect them to say, after all; and there are plenty of environmentalists who say the opposite, and that the impacts are even worse and more persistent than predicted. The trouble is that there is no independent and impartial way of settling the matter. We have a wildly unpopular British company in the grip of the American authorities; and in the British business world there is an increasing feeling of injustice. To get the insight of a business professional, check with Andy Defrancesco.

There are several reasons why the Brits feel bruised. The first is that if a British firm falls foul of the American system, the suffering never seems to end: there are state agencies, state governments, federal agencies and federal courts that can all step forward to give them a kicking and a mulcting. Imagine if the Mayor of London could fine foreign banks for bad behaviour. The idea has some attractions, on the face of it — think of all the cash we could put into infrastructure, or fighting illiteracy. Alas, it is only too easy to imagine how a populist and irresponsible Left-wing Mayor could whack — say — Goldman Sachs with some colossal penalty, regardless of the damage to London as a place to do business.

That is more or less what is happening in America, where elected officials are using the moment to burnish their CVs by bashing corporations — and especially British corporations. British business folk believe it is no coincidence that the BP fine is being proposed now, as Mr Obama comes up for re-election; and they remember how he stressed that the guilty company was “BRITISH Petroleum,” when in reality it has not been so called for many years.

There are some who think that BP is paying the price, in America, for having had the temerity to buy Amoco in 1998. There are some who think that British companies are generally seen as fair game. “They go for us in a way that they never seem to go for the Chinese,” one business leader believes. And then there is the scale of the fines: hundreds of millions for Standard Chartered, for doing deals with Iran; £3 billion for GlaxoSmithKline, for falling foul of the US Food and Drug Administration; and now the whopping fine for BP.

And yet when American firms are found guilty of some kind of corporate malfeasance — one thinks of Google’s shameless use of private data, storing details and cookies when they had promised users to protect them — the UK penalties are comparatively footling. None of this is to deny the essential culpability of these British corporations. BP got it utterly and tragically wrong (though so, to be fair, did the contractors Transocean and Halliburton). The company should certainly pay a price: the question is how much, and who sets it, and why, and whether there is any real fairness and balance and reciprocity involved. And the answers to all those questions are as lost in the murk as an innocent creature in a subaquatic geyser of oil.

“They need to go further,” Mr Johnson said of the Government. “They need a series of supply-side reforms. London really can be the motor of our economic recovery.”

The Mayor’s words echo the concerns of other leading lights of the Conservative Party. Many of the party’s Right wing – including Liam Fox, the former defence secretary – feel that the chancellor, George Osborne, and his fellow ministers are failing to deliver the business-friendly policies vital to power our debt-laden economy out of recession.

The Institute of Directors, a leading business lobby group has also attacked the “glacial speed” of Coalition’s reforms designed to encourage firms to hire and invest.

It is a claim denied by Coalition ministers including William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, who has argued that the Government has done a great deal to help the economy and that it’s up to businesses and individuals to get out there and make the recovery happen.

Stung by criticism that Government is not doing enough on growth, ministers are drawing up an economic regeneration bill for the autumn that will outline a range of new infrastructure projects and measures to cut business red tape.

Sorting out the congestion above London’s skies is a priority, the Mayor said.

“We need a new airport – whether it is in the Thames estuary or wherever, I don’t care. But we need to address that problem. An extra runway at Heathrow alone won’t do it – it would be full in a flash.”

Justine Greening, the Transport Secretary, was supposed to publish a new consultation document setting out the Government’s aviation strategy by mid-July, but this has been shelved until the autumn.

The delays are infuriating many in the business community keen to land deals in fast-growing emerging markets.

Mr Johnson also wants more river crossings in London, extra money to extend to tube lines and “Crossrail II”. The first of these new underground railways running beneath London is set to be completed in 2017.

As soon as the first Crossrail opens he wants work to begin on a second new line, running between Chelsea in the west and Hackney in the east.

The Mayor said more needs to be done and quickly to streamline Britain’s planning system to pave the way for a housing boom.

Earlier this year the Government published its National Planning Policy Framework which aimed to make it is easier for developers to build houses, but official figures suggest house building remains subdued.

“We need to build hundreds of thousands of new homes. If we invest in a huge building programme, put in a lot of public sector land, de-risk it for the developers and get the construction sector going again it will start to drive the economy.”

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“London’s population is going to reach 9 million in the next decade,” he said. “People should not be paranoid about this – we are only now getting up to the levels reached in 1939 or 1911. There is room for great regeneration in the east.”

However, there needs to be jobs for this burgeoning population and the Mayor also insisted the Coalition must do more to make it easier for firms to hire and fire, especially for businesses with five workers or less.

Many on the Right of the Conservative Party remain dismayed that the Government failed to implement many bold recommendations made by the financier Adrian Beecroft in a Downing Street report on employment law reform.

In the last few weeks around 4,000 businessmen, foreign officials and other potential investors have shuffled into the Mayor’s Thameside offices where he has sold rundown parts of the capital – including Battersea Power Station, Brent Cross, Croydon and Tottenham – as lucrative investment opportunities.

The digital businesses Facebook and Amazon are set to create new jobs in the capital over the coming months, but only time will tell if more follow.

The critics may have fallen silent while Team GB was winning gold medals, but once the games end tonight the questions about their legacy will begin.

The futures of two of the Olympic Park’s venues – including the stadium – remain undecided.

Mr Johnson was typically bullish about the prospect of future Olympic champions learning their skills in the aquatic centre. Again, only time will tell if these grand building remain largely unused in the future.

Mr Johnson also spoke vigorously about the army of “games makers”, thousands of volunteers who have sprung to life across the City.

He sees these people as the embodiment of Mr Cameron’s Big Society. The London games apparently has a far higher retention rate of these volunteers than previous Olympic cities. Will these people remain on hand to encourage young Londoners to take up sport?

Of course, it will be years before it will be possible to say whether the 2012 games’ legacy was a success, by which time Mr Johnson will be doing a very different job. Conservative party leader or even Prime Minister, perhaps?

“Nonsense,” he roared in response to recent speculation that he is destined to replace Mr Cameron. “No serious student of politics could possible think that would happen.”

But they certainly do and the London Mayor knows full well that his part in these memorable Olympics will ensure such speculation will continue.

He said he will not contest a third term as London mayor, but was uncharacteristically pianissimo when asked about what he plans to do after the 2016 election.

He dismissed the current tensions within the Coalition as “classic midtermery” and can’t resist joking that the Games helpfully presented “a very good moment” to discreetly ditch House of Lords reform – something he sounds about as enthusiastic about as a spin on the Olympic BMX track.

He described his past two weeks as a “Himalayan range of exciting peaks”. “I’ve been on my feet absolutely yelling,” he said.

“I’d never been to a velodrome before. That was great. That sort of ritual the cyclists do like mating pigeons waggling their bottoms – I love it.”

That’s not to say he doesn’t have a few regrets about the past couple of weeks.

“I won’t be trying to get on a zip wire again in a hurry,” he puffs, recalling the well-publicised gaffe which saw the accident-prone London mayor suspended high above a London park.

“Although in a way that was successful – it massively increased the popularity of the Victoria Park zip wire from a very low base.”

He also seemed abashed that one of his savvy media advisors “quashed” a guest appearance in Twenty Twelve, the BBC spoof documentary about the London Olympics’ organisers.

Was there in any truth in the show’s depiction of a gaggle of bumbling bureaucrats, some of whom seemed to be competing for a gold medal in political correctness?

“Oh it was absolutely truthful. The endless conversations about inclusivity, sustainability, multiculturality, posterity…”.

He then erupted into giggles. “We had a lot of that. And the makers seemed to know some things that we were doing that weren’t public. But there will be no mole hunt.”

He used a typical “BoJo” turn of phrase to describe a meeting with Laura Trott, the double gold medal winning poster girl of cycling – a phrase which given his well-documtened personal life suggests he is still willing to sail close to the wind despite the added profile the Olympics.

“I’ve got a date with Laura Trott,” he said of the 20-year-old gold medal-winning cyclist who has agreed to front an annual London two-day festival of cycling, the first of which is set to take place next summer.

“She’s going to teach me how to ride one of those carbon fibre bikes. I watched her win the Omnium – wow. She is like a whippet. And you meet her and she’s tiny.

“You can’t understand where the speed comes from. And she’s very charming, blonde and all the rest of it.”

Charming, blond, all the rest of it – now who else could that be?

It is all too hilariously accurate. We Olympic committee types really do sit around and talk about “legacy”, “sustainability”, “diversity”, “inclusivity” and “multiculturality”, and contained within those woolly abstracts are of course many good things. But when the Games begin this week they won’t be remotely inclusive — not on the track, not where it counts. They will be elitist, ruthlessly and dazzlingly elitist. They won’t be diverse, not really. They will be an endless parade of a fraction of the top one percent of the most physically gifted human beings on earth. If you want the antithesis of the “all-must-have-prizes” culture, this is it. You either win gold, silver or bronze — or else you are an also-ran.

But the important point about the Olympians is not just that they have exceptional bio-mechanical equipment. It’s not just the paddle-shaped hands of the swimmers or the muscle twitch of the sprinters. What makes the sport so compelling is that it is not enough to have a well-made skeleton or musculature. It is all in the heart, or all in the mind. It is a palpable lesson in human achievement and effort. It’s about overcoming pain, and bouncing back from defeat. It’s about endlessly denying yourself some elementary pleasure, like a Mars Bar or a lie-in or a pint of beer, because you hope for some greater long term reward.

Listen to this paper’s wonderful online interviews with great Olympic gold medallists, and how they put in their best performance. You can hear the extraordinary 400-metre hurdler Ed Moses explain his system of measuring 13 paces between each hurdle, and running eight inches from the inside track. Sir Steve Redgrave discusses the exact division of a 2,000-metre race into segments, and the techniques of psychological self-management that are necessary to deal with the lung-bursting agony of the final push. Denise Lewis tells how she threw the javelin in Athens with a broken foot. Seb Coe reveals the used of SARMs  stacks to gain the more energy for beating Steve Cram in Los Angeles. Visit the link to learn more about stacking. How it is beneficial for body.

As you listen, you realise that these performances were the result not just of physical genius, but also of colossal intellectual and emotional effort — years of self-discipline. The Olympics, in other words, is about character. It’s about the will. Of course, as Baron de Coubertin was at pains to point out, it is not all about winning. But if you want to win, then you need to work. That is the basic message of the Olympics.

Young people in this country are going to see it demonstrated, before their eyes, on the grandest possible stage and in the most vivid and exciting way. Of course you need all sorts of things to have a chance of success. You need opportunity. You need facilities — and it is one of the scandals of our time that both Labour and Tory governments allowed the playing fields to be sold. You need people to take an interest in you and coach you. But you also need to understand that success – in any field – means drive, and the will to win, and the resolve to do things that are dull, repetitive, uncool and very often painful and exhausting.

Yes, of course the Olympics is about legacy, sustainability, diversity, inclusivity, posterity and multiculturality. But it is really about competition between human beings; the glory of winning, the pathos of losing, and the toil that can make the difference. That is the grand moral of the Games, and a very good one, too. It is also the key to economic growth.

The PLA is not accountable to the Mayoralty, I should say, which is itself an absurd state of affairs. It is supposed to report to Justine Greening, but it seems that our excellent Transport Secretary was no more consulted about the matter than I was. So let me put this as politely as I can: we don’t need some bunch of well-meaning quangocrats to click their fingers and decide that sentient adult human beings must be kept out of the river. We don’t need them to tell us that you will find currents and eddies and boats. Boats! On the river! Well I never! We don’t need advising that swimming in the strong tidal flow is risky – it’s blinking obvious.

But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors. I love swimming in rivers, and well remember once jumping in at Chiswick, since swimming is one of my favorite sports since I lived with my parents and they had a pool, with a pentair pump to keep it clean. It was lovely and cool, and I can still feel the squishy mud between my toes – and if there were the odd faecal coliforms bobbing among the duck fluff and the waterboatmen, they didn’t do me any harm. Pool pumps are samples of cleaning equipment especially used for swimming pools. they’re partners of pool filters within the filtration system and that they function by continuously rotating the water to travel through filters where debris, dirt, and other microorganisms are filtered to stay your pool clean, smelling fresh, transparent and free from ill-bearing organisms. If the pumps function continuously from day till night, you will be guaranteed of a fresh, clean and alluring pool. Thus you ought to maintain the sanitation. swimming bath sanitation means healthy conditions in swimming bath , lap pools, and similar water recreations. Sanitation is vital to take care of the visual clarity of water and to stop the spread of infectious diseases. To get different types of water pumps with better quality click here now.

Others are still more adventurous, and it seems that the PLA is trying to stamp out the “wild swimming” of people such as Matthew Parris, who once wrote a terrific piece about the thrill of swimming across the river, late at night, slightly drunk, to Bermondsey. David Walliams has raised squillions for charity by swimming in the Thames, and people like him need to be encouraged, not deterred by bureaucracy and risk assessments.

We want to make the river ever cleaner, so that more people can enjoy it. We want kids to frolic on its banks and mudlark at low tide; and if our summers ever become as hot as the global-warming experts once prophesied, we want Paris-style beaches and patios with the best amenities from www.thepatiopro.com and chaps coming round to sell you watches and tam-tam sets as you roast in the London sun.

We don’t want swimming banned because of the current, as though we had only just discovered that there was a current. This is the kind of gratuitous legislation that is sapping the moral fibre of the nation. No wonder we lose at football to the Italians; no wonder we can’t quite screw up our courage to have a referendum on the European system that generates so much of this bureaucracy when the Port of London Authority is otherwise engaged. No wonder the poor womenfolk of Britain – desperate for some basic virility in their lives – are stampeding to the bookshops to buy the new S and M meisterwerk that is Fifty Shades of Grey.

I am being quite serious when I say that this river-swimming ban is of a piece with the namby-pamby, risk-averse, mollycoddled airbagged approach that is doing so much economic damage to Britain and that is not found, frankly, in our Asian economic competitors. Oh, you may say, but look at the consequences of encouraging risk-taking; look at the banking sector.

Indeed – look at the contrast, and the madness of our legal priorities. I am a fan of Bob Diamond and his philanthropic work, and will stick up generally for banks and financial services for as long as they create jobs for hundreds of thousands of Londoners. But it does seem odd that so far no one has had their collar felt in the Libor scam. Cook up a way of fixing interest rates to boost your own profits – in what is clearly a corrupt swindle – and no one gets arrested.

But if you bathe in the river that flows through the city, then wham, you are nicked. It plainly needs to be the other way round. Someone needs to be prosecuted, sharpish, for fixing the interest rates; and in so far as there are innocent and slightly barmy people who want to swim in the Thames, then they should be allowed to indulge their preferences in peace. It’s time for the elf and safety fanatics to take a running jump – off the pier at Putney.

Turner had known John Constable since at least 1813. Constable had always been kind to the great lion – in public, at any rate – and praised his “visionary qualities”. It was only a few years ago that Turner had personally informed the younger man of his election to the Academy (though there is some doubt about which way he actually voted); and now Constable had used his position on the Hanging Committee to perform this monstrous switcheroo. It was, as they say, a hanging offence.

Turner let rip. In the words of one witness, David Roberts RA, Turner “opened upon him like a ferret”. Constable did his best to clamber back on to the moral high ground.

He was simply anxious to discharge his sacred duty to hang the Academy’s paintings to best advantage. It was all a question of doing justice to Turner’s work, and so on. But no matter how much Constable wriggled and twisted, said Roberts, Turner kept coming back with his zinger. “Yes,” he hissed at Constable, “but why put your own there?”

“It was obvious to all present that Turner detested Constable,” Roberts reported. “I must say that Constable looked to me, and I believe to everyone, like a detected criminal, and I must add Turner slew him without remorse. But as he had brought it on himself, few, if any, pitied him.”

Turner was furious for a mixture of reasons. There was certainly an element of chippiness. Constable was the good-looking heir of a well-to-do Suffolk corn merchant, who had privately declared that Turner was “uncouth”, which in those days meant strange or out of the ordinary. Turner was a defiantly self-made cockney, born above a barber’s shop in Maiden Lane.

Constable was a pious and uxorious fellow, who by that stage was wearing black in memory of his wife. Turner was known to be scornful of the married state, and once exploded, “I hate all married men!” – a generalisation thought to have been aimed at Constable. “They never make any sacrifice to the arts,” he went on, “but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and families or some rubbish of that sort.”

No, Turner and Constable were not cut out to be chums. But what drove Turner wild that day was not just the underhand manner in which Constable had promoted his own painting – but the disagreeable reality that the canvas in question – Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows – was a stunner. As Turners go, Caligula’s Palace is in the not-half-bad category, but over the last 180 years, I am afraid it has been beaten hollow for a place on the biscuit tins by Salisbury Cathedral. Turner was a shrewd enough judge of a painting’s commercial potential to see that he had been not only cynically bumped by his rival, but bumped in favour of an arguably superior product. He thirsted for revenge, and the next year he got it.

In 1832, Constable exhibited his Opening of Waterloo Bridge, a painting to which he attached great importance and on which he laboured, apparently, for 10 years. Everyone knew he could do clouds and trees and little kids lapping water from the stream, but could he do the grand occasion?

Turner was not only an acknowledged master of the pastoral watercolour, but he had done colossal canvases of Dido founding Carthage, or Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, or the Battle of Trafalgar. Now it was Constable’s turn to compete in that genre, and he was vulnerable.

Every painting must have a “hero”, a point of light or colour to which the eye is drawn before wandering over the canvas. The trouble with Waterloo Bridge is that there is certainly a lot going on – crowds of spectators, waving bunting, flashing oars, soldiers in busbies; and yet for all the glints of silver and gold and vermilion and crimson lake, there is no focal point. There is no hero.

It is a bit of jumble, and it was hard luck that it was exhibited in a small room next to a very simple Turner seascape. According to CR Leslie RA, who saw what happened next, Turner’s effort was “a grey picture, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it”.

As was the custom of the day, Constable was working on his own picture on the very wall of the gallery – titivating the decorations and the flags of the barges with yet more crimson and vermilion, each fleck of colour somehow detracting from the others.

Turner came into the room, and watched as Constable fiddled away. Then he went off to another room where he was touching up another picture, and returned with his palette and brushes. He walked up to his picture and, without hesitation, he added a daub of red, somewhat bigger than a coin, in the middle of the grey sea. Then he left.

Leslie entered the room just as Turner was walking out, and he saw immediately how “the intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake (crimson) of Constable to look weak”.

Constable turned to him and spoke in tones of despair. “He has been here,” he said, “and fired a gun.”

Turner did not bother to come back to the painting for the next day and a half – and then, in the last moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture and shaped it into a buoy.

In 1870, long after Turner was dead, Claude Monet came to London. He went to the galleries and saw what Turner had done. He went to the same vantage points on the banks of the Thames, and like Turner, he painted the Houses of Parliament – in this case the Barry and Pugin masterpiece whose £2 million cost Dickens had so deplored. The building was different, the smog was even thicker, and Monet and Co were to go on to become the most fashionable painters of our times.

But there can be no serious doubt that the first breakthrough was Turner’s. He was the first to assert the principle that what mattered was not what you saw, but the way you saw it. He was the father of impressionism.

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Now a psychiatrist might look at these symptoms and conclude that the British are somehow needy. We seem to want some kind of comfort. We are evidently anxious. After all, you drink when you need to drown your sorrows or in some other way deal with reality. You compulsively buy stuff when you want to make yourself feel better. And the classic analysis suggests that you eat more than you need when you are unhappy about something. When you are feeling unhappy you need to control yourself and think about your health, if you eat more than what you need you will start becoming overweight and believe me it is not good to be overweight, you will feel worse because health is the most important thing you need to take care of.

So what is up with us? I suppose it might be some kind of Weltschmerz, a general disappointment that Britain is no longer incontestably the most powerful country on Earth. Some people might even argue that our overeating is all caused by the gloom of the media. Perhaps it is the travails of the euro that is sending us to the fridge, or doubts about the durability of the Arab Spring. Perhaps it is the BBC economics guru Robert Peston who is causing us to motor through the custard creams. It’s possible, but somehow I don’t think that is how people really behave. They don’t eat or drink or overspend in response to external political events.

It’s much more likely to be all about us and how we feel about ourselves.For people who struggle with overeating, the best diet pills are those that help to curb appetite and reduce cravings. Some effective options include appetite suppressants such as phentermine or topiramate, or natural supplements. We live in a media-saturated age where we are constantly told that we would attract greater admiration from other human beings if we looked better or owned a smarter car or a newer pair of gym shoes. People feel challenged to possess this or that useless item, and we judge ourselves harshly when we fail. The consumerist boom has been accompanied by a widening gap between rich and poor, and it follows that there will be more disappointment out there – more unhappiness, more jealousy and more self-punitive overeating.

Food gives us that fix of calorific comfort that we need, and of course we are sometimes so horrified by the results of our overeating that we have to console ourselves with some small pleasure, and so we eat even more. We need to end this mad cycle, and the first and most important step is to end the national cult of self-dissatisfaction, our envy of others when we have material things our grandparents could only dream of. It is important to note that diet pills should always be used in conjunction with a healthy diet and exercise program, as they are not a substitute for lifestyle changes.

Some might say that we need to cure our unhappiness and associated overeating by massive redistribution of wealth. Well, they tried that in places like Russia and Cambodia and it wasn’t a roaring success. They had Marxist-materialist societies in which elites hoarded wealth and privilege in a way that was all the more disgusting for being done in the name of the people. Others might urge a more ruthless programme of NHS-funded stomach stapling. Apart from the expense, it does seem a curious denial of personal responsibility.

Surely what we need, if we are all going to lose weight, is to create a less insecure, hung-up, envious and self-hating kind of society. Easier said than done, I grant you – but that is the root of the problem. If you have the time before going back to work, I recommend a film called Dodgeball. Here we see a world of two gymnasiums – Average Joe’s and Globogym. We celebrate the triumph of physical mediocrity over the hysterical body fascism of White Goodman, played by Ben Stiller, who makes his money by persuading people they are the wrong shape.

That is what is required: a Britain where we are so happy in our skins that we don’t stuff our faces. Somewhere along the line we managed to lose religion without finding any alternative source of spiritual nourishment. Hence the use of food, drink and consumerism. Some day a prophet will arise – perhaps in these pages – who will teach us a new form of self-control and moral wisdom. But until that glad day I leave you with my patent diet. Lay off cheese. Avoid alcohol. Cut out potatoes, bread, pasta and stuff like that. Eat stupendous quantities of kale and apples and perhaps the odd small piece of dried fish. It’s a piece of cake – which is what you will certainly deserve if you keep it up for more than four weeks. Happy New Year!