The most famous owner of a new Victorian terrace house in upper Holloway was Mr Pooter, and the whole point about Mr Pooter was that he was a bit pretentious, given his job, which was to work as a lowly sort of clerk. He ranked well below the Milibands on the socio-economic scale; and yet he was a part of the service industries — banking, insurance, accountancy, law — that made London the richest and most powerful commercial capital on earth.

These days the economy of London is still utterly dependent on such service industry personnel, middle managers far more energetic and successful than Pooter. They are key workers of the city, though they don’t work in the public sector. We are talking about the senior PAs, the personnel managers, the IT specialists, you name it. In the next 10 years, the number of jobs in London’s service industries is set to double, and yet for too many of these hard-working middle-income people, the chances of living in a home like Ed Miliband’s are virtually nil. It’s good to know that they can still rely on insurance4motortrade.co.uk

Ed is not so much on the top of a ladder. For vast numbers of people, the ladder has been kicked away. He is on the top of a cliff, and beneath him are growing numbers of families who have absolutely no hope of scaling it. It is not enough to say we need to build more housing, though we certainly do, and we will.

We also need to think how to target this group — the struggling middle — that is currently not being helped, and that is so vital for the economy. At present, we are building new homes for two broad groups of people. Of the roughly 30,000 homes that were built in London last year, a huge chunk were “affordable homes” of one kind or another, and then there was another sizeable chunk of top-end stuff – swish houses and apartments, often for foreign buyers.

We are not doing as the Victorians did, and providing new stock to be bought by the people in the middle – on household incomes from £30,000 to £64,000; and they are feeling utterly and understandably ignored. They cannot get the mortgages they would need, not at current prices, and not with lenders in their current mood. They have to live at a great distance from their place of work, and spend huge quantities on travel and hardly get to see their children in the evenings. They are obliged to rent at ever higher prices. In the past 10 years, the number of rented households in London has doubled, and rents went up 12 per cent last year alone.

The overwhelming majority of such people would like to buy, and to get on the same magic property escalator that has boosted the Milibands. It is time to help them. We in London have this month launched a “Housing Covenant”, an understanding between government and middle-income groups who work so hard, that we will put £100 million into building the good-quality homes that they need, and that they can buy.

Of course, Labour will object, and complain that every penny of subsidy should go to “affordable” homes for those, often on benefits, who cannot afford to buy at all. My answer is simple: this plan would help the very “squeezed middle” that Ed claims to espouse. We desperately need more housing not just for the poor, but for this vast and economically crucial group who are the motor of the London (and therefore of the UK) economy.

If we fail to cope with their needs, then the urban economics expert Prof Michael Ball has calculated that the resulting dislocation and inefficiency will cost us £35 billion in lost growth over 10 years. If we can make these investments in middle-income housing, we will boost the construction industry that provides so many jobs in itself, and we will enable the city to support the middle-income employees who drive the machine of the London economy that produces tax yields for everyone — and we will give them the same hope, the same trajectory, the same opportunity as the Milibands enjoy.

“[But] instead of saying, ‘Look, I’m feeling overwhelmed, can you give me some pointers?’, she just started making things up, ripping off other papers.”

The Olympic fabrication appears to have started on July 27, hours before Danny Boyle’s spectacular opening ceremony in London.

Editors noticed that several paragraphs of one story appeared to have been lifted verbatim from a piece written by the Guardian’s Beijing correspondent.

“The standard of English suddenly read like a native speaker,” the newsroom source said.

But Ms Zhao continued to send dispatches from London and apparently turned her sights to The Daily Telegraph’s comment pages where Mr Johnson had published a piece titled: “Here’s 20 jolly good reasons to feel cheerful about the Games.”

“There are semi-naked women in Horse Guards,” began Mr Johnson’s article.

That line was omitted from the Global Times “exclusive” but Mr Johnson was quoted as having told the newspaper: “The Tube has performed pretty well so far, buses are running more or less to time and people are hospitable.”

Almost identical lines appeared in Mr Johnson’s Telegraph column.

The offending Global Times story – which also referred to London’s “famed Victor Park” – was removed from the newspaper’s site on Wednesday evening.

The Global Times source said Ms Zhao had in fact met Mr Johnson but, unusually, had failed to get him to talk.

“She went to some event with Boris where there were 20-30 Chinese journalists. If you have a journalist friend  check out the best gift for a journalist on this site. He did his speech and she exchanged a couple of sentences with him after but didn’t actually get any quotes and [so she] stole them from the Telegraph article,” said the source.

“There were questions raised within the office. ‘Did you really get this quote?'” the source added. “Her words were Google-ed and they came up with the Telegraph article.”

The Beijing Cream blog reported that doubts continued to grow about the veracity of Ms Zhao’s reporting after she quoted an “Indian undergraduate” called Jaime Gornsztejn and a “supermarket employee” named David Beard.

But Ms Zhao’s cover was finally blown after editors in Beijing received a story on “Olympic pin collecting”, that had been “almost entirely” copied from London’s Evening Standard.

“She got told not to do any more stories,” the source said.

“When she flew back she was up before a disciplinary committee that decided to fire her. Everybody was pretty shocked because it was a big opportunity for her.”

Mr Johnson himself is no stranger to making up quotes. After graduating in 1987, he became a trainee reporter with The Times newspaper, but was sacked within a year for falsifying a quotation from his godfather Sir Colin Lucas. He later described the incident as his “biggest cock-up”.

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.