President Barack Obama today said BP's breakthrough in temporarily stopping the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico was "good news", but warned there was still lots to do.

The positive news yesterday from BP on capping the oil spill is not too little too late for the company, but it is too late for sure.

Shares in BP surged more than 9 per cent yesterday on hopes it is about to seal deals with the US oil and gas group Apache to sell up to $10bn (£6.7bn) of assets as it grapples with the costs of its spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The latest high-stakes effort to contain the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was making progress last night, BP claimed, as remote-controlled robots continued the painstaking work of affixing a new "top hat" on the gushing well, a mile under the surface of the sea.

A relief well being drilled deep into the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico to shut down the gushing oil well could be completed ahead of a long-set deadline of mid-August only if conditions are ideal, government and BP officials said yesterday.

BP is understood to be teaming up with US oil giant Chevron to bid for a deep sea exploration licence in the South China Sea. Chevron will hold the majority stake and will be the operator of the concession, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal.

A harrowing painting by Daphne Todd which depicts the artist's dead mother was announced as the winner of the BP Portrait Award last night.

The term kangaroo court is not, as might be supposed, Australian.

Last week two Englishmen said that they were deeply sorry, but David Cameron had an easier time of it than Tony Hayward. The prime minister’s unequivocal apology in Parliament for what he called the indefensible shootings in Londonderry in 1972 was universally praised for its candour and courage.

The Prime Minister faces calls to mount a robust public defence of BP in the face of ever sharper condemnation from Washington. His critics say that Britain's honour has been impugned, not least by the disparaging rhetoric coming from President Obama and his outdated references to "British Petroleum". They are urging Mr Cameron to hit back in kind. We disagree.

Beleaguered BP today said the total cost of the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico had hit more than 1.6 billion US dollars (£1.1 billion) so far.

The boss of BP, Tony Hayward, was battling yesterday to quell criticism of the company's handling of the Gulf oil spill, even as its latest image repair campaign drew indignation, and fresh evidence emerged of a pattern of safety shortcuts and slipshod management aboard the rig that exploded.

What do we want from the leaders of our biggest companies? The response of Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, to the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in many ways has been a textbook example of the behaviour one might hope to see from the leader of a corporate giant confronted with this sort of crisis. Yet Mr Hayward has been pilloried, both in the United States and back home, facing not just calls for his resignation but some deeply unpleasant personal abuse.