As Hayward becomes the new Sir Fred, who will be Bob Dudley’s role model?

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

I told you so — and I might even have said it first. ‘Hayward may have to be sacrificed,’ I wrote on 5 June. ‘In that case, the next man in the line of fire could be Bob Dudley, who has the advantage of being an American…’ I might have added that Dudley came into BP (where he takes over as chief executive on 1 October) by way of its 1998 takeover of Amoco, where he was a rising star; and the name Amoco is a contraction of ‘American Oil Company’, making President Obama’s symbolic victory over ‘British Petroleum’ complete.

The departing Tony Hayward, meanwhile, becomes the new Fred Goodwin, vilified for the size of his ‘reward for failure’ severance package. But the BP board has come up with a brilliant device to save him having to take his family into hiding abroad as Sir Fred did: they want to send Hayward to Siberia as a director of the TNK-BP joint venture he had a hand in setting up. I still have some sympathy for Hayward — who has not been brought down by excessive, ego-driven risk-taking as Goodwin was, but has simply proved incapable of getting his message across: the internal message, before the Gulf rig disaster, that operational safety was paramount; and the external message afterwards, that BP was determined to do the right thing. So he now walks the plank with a fat contractual sack of pension rights tied round his neck. But the British media should ease off on the vilification; let’s leave that to the Yanks.

As for Bob Dudley, who can he take as his role model, three of his four BP predecessors (Lord Browne and Bob Horton as well as Hayward) having fallen short in one way or another? Elsewhere in the corporate pantheon, the answer might be a combination of the leathery PR skills of Sir Stuart Rose of Marks & Spencer in good times and bad, and the sheer industrial stamina of Sir John Rose of Rolls-Royce.