Bill Carmichael: Oil affair stains Obama's image

This will come as a bit of a surprise to his cheerleaders on the Left who seemed to think the US President's supernatural powers would put right all the world's ills.

To be fair, Obama himself was a major contributor to his own Messianic personality cult, telling his starry-eyed followers, apparently entirely seriously, that his election "was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal".

Well, the healing of the planet bit hasn't been going too well lately – certainly not in the Gulf of Mexico.

Faced with the seemingly endless gush of oil from BP's stricken Deep Horizon oil well, President Obama has made the painful discovery that comes eventually to all adolescents – that petulant foot-stamping doesn't always work.

It doesn't matter how mad you get, or how many "asses" you threaten to kick, there are certain things – like fractured high-pressure pipes – that won't take any notice.

Things got decidedly worse this week when, in another juvenile fit of pique, Obama sacked his top man in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, after the general's aides described the Obama administration as a bunch of wimps.

Isn't the conduct of the war in Afghanistan, where British troops are sacrificing their lives on an almost daily basis, more important than the President's bruised ego? Apparently not.

What these crises have exposed is that far from being a new type of leader, Obama is an old-fashioned machine politician – and one with no managerial or executive experience whatsoever.

Obama's shakedown of BP to create a $20bn dollar slush fund is a classic example. BP had already promised to pay all justified claims arising from the oil spill. But Obama squeezed the company for more.

Although Obama's wild thrashing out is unlikely to do any good, it certainly has the potential to do a great deal of harm – most seriously in Afghanistan where the last thing we need is further uncertainty over strategy at a time when British troops are fighting daily battles against the Taliban.

And although BP hasn't exactly covered itself in glory on the public relations front, Obama's vindictive bullying of the company can do irreparable damage to a great British success story that is a major contributor to company pension funds on both sides of the Atlantic.

I never thought I'd live to see a worse US President than Jimmy Carter, but less than two years into the job, Barack Obama is already running him mightily close.

Not very nice

It's hard to pick up a newspaper these days without seeing headlines about the health quango, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, better known by its Orwellian moniker, Nice.

I thought Nice was a sort of NHS death panel that decided which taxpayers would receive the drugs they needed to stay alive and which wouldn't.

But that is only the half of it. In recent weeks, Nice has also demanded that primary school pupils are given lessons on sex and alcohol, that new laws be introduced to combat foods with high salt and fat content, and that farmers be subsidised to produce healthy foods.

It is a classic example of how the nanny state insinuates itself into every part of a private citizen's life.

But the latest piece of pursed-lipped, finger-wagging from Nice goes even further. The quango now demands that pregnant women who tell their midwife they've quit smoking should be given a carbon monoxide test to see if they are lying.

And what if they are? Will the poor women be dragged off to a smoke-free re-education camp?

The problem with Nice is that it is not only its name that is Orwellian.