Best not to say too much about Albert Manifold, who was ousted as chairman of BP last week after only eight months in post over ‘governance oversight and conduct issues’. Manifold called the board’s allegations against him ‘lies’ and writs may be expected to fly. But the broader question is why a 117-year-old company built on long-term collegiate strategy-making has become incapable of holding a stable leadership team together from one year to the next.
Bernard Looney was chief executive from 2020 until he resigned in 2023 after allegations that he misled BP’s board over relationships with colleagues. His successor, Murray Auchincloss, lasted less than two years before being replaced by Meg O’Neill, headhunted from Woodside Energy in Australia. Helge Lund stood down as chairman last year under shareholder pressure to accelerate a shift back to fossil fuels from the focus on renewables previously driven by Looney. Now Manifold has been temporarily replaced by Ian Tyler, a construction industry veteran who was BP’s senior independent director.
This revolving door reflects, in part, the challenge of the energy world’s about-turn against the previous decade’s net-zero agenda. BP’s business model, based on multi-billion capital projects with 20-year paybacks, has long been in conflict with investors’ demand for short-term fizz that boosts the share price. There’s also a market prejudice against internal promotion of senior executives, which was the BP norm up to and including Auchincloss. But every hired-in chief who sets out to be more muscular than the last is another disruption.
The old BP survived every vicissitude, including the loss of its assets in Russia and disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, with resilience derived from a deep internal culture and hierarchy. Today’s BP seems to have lost all self-confidence and shared sense of direction. No wonder it’s so often mentioned as a takeover target, whether by a global rival such as Exxon or Shell, or the assassins of private equity.
Unsung hero
The issue of stock-market short-termism that undervalues long-term corporate strategy goes back decades. One industrialist who raged against it was Sir Ralph Robins, chairman of Rolls-Royce from 1992 to 2003, who watched the Rolls share price flounder while its portion of the global aero-engine market soared. I can’t improve on this quote from the Financial Times: ‘“What do you want,” Sir Ralph would ask [investors]. “A world-leading company in a dozen years’ time, or a bigger pay-out today?” Time and again, the reply would come: “Give us the money.”’
The same article called Robins, who died a few days ago aged 93, ‘an unsung hero of British industry’. I last saw him – and interrupted him briefly to chat – lunching solo, as was his habit, at Ziani in Chelsea. I’m proud to report he was reading The Spectator.
Sinister corporations
Palantir is the new Fujitsu – and in parts of the public imagination, both are the new Petrofex. I fear few readers will get that last reference, to a fictional multinational that tried to manipulate the British government in an easily forgotten 2012 TV drama called Secret State. My point is that the ‘sinister foreign corporation’ is a stereotype elaborated by screenwriters but echoed in real life.
Fujitsu is the Japanese firm that bought ICL, which was Britain’s last national champion in the IT sector. That gave it an embedded position as a supplier of public-sector systems, including the notorious Horizon software behind the Post Office scandal. Fujitsu still has a handle on everything from nuclear submarines and airport e-gates to ‘Making Tax Digital’, rendering it apparently unsackable despite the Horizon disgrace.
And now here is Palantir, the data analytics venture backed by ‘techno-nationalist’ Trumpist US billionaires. London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has blocked a £50 million contract for Palantir to supply crime-tracking AI to the Metropolitan Police, while the British Medical Association has called for the NHS to drop Palantir’s ‘federated data platform’ which co-ordinates information across multiple health trusts – the fear being that Palantir will control (though ministers claim it won’t) the ‘single patient record’ that will one day hold all our medical data.
Should we be very scared, or should we trust ministers to buy systems that transform public service? Much more the former, I’d say: the lesson of Fujitsu must be never to let any IT supplier, Palantir or whoever, hold the whip hand over its Whitehall customers.
Standing proud
Smartarses have been poking fun at the self-made billionaire John Caudwell for commissioning a marble statue of himself as the finishing touch for a £300 million apartment scheme on the French Riviera. The sniggering has focused on the fact that the seven-foot figure, by a sculptor who once worked in the Vatican, exaggerates Caudwell’s size (ho-ho) and dresses him in ‘smart-casual jacket and jeans’.
I’m totally on Caudwell’s side here. Having once had a meeting with him that was filmed throughout by his personal ‘heritage videographer’, I can confirm he has an ego that may well exceed seven feet. But this is a man who started as an apprentice in a Stoke-on-Trent tyre factory and went on to create the hugely successful Phones4U retail chain. Having cashed out for a fortune, he turned to luxury property development and gave large sums to children’s charities. If he chooses to raise a monument to himself which even he describes as ‘a bit cringey’, why shouldn’t he?
And if we could all commission statues of ourselves, what would they look like? Personally, I’d opt for something in the style of Rodin’s nine-foot Honoré de Balzac in his wraparound cloak. But if I’d built a business that employed 10,000 people and sold it for £1.5 billion, as Caudwell did, my model might be Michaelangelo’s heroic 17-foot ‘David’: naked, proud and an eye-level rebuke to my mockers.
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