Bp

Monday

Peter Hoskin

The Hayward saga draws to a close

There has been an inevitability about Tony Hayward’s departure from BP ever since the first aftershocks of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But now, despite BP’s peculiar denials this morning, that inevitability has reached fever pitch – and it’s widely expected that Hayward will be booted out of his job tomorrow morning. As a thousand comment writers have quipped, he can now get his life back. The question on most observer’s minds is, does he deserve it? And it’s a question which Allister Heath answers persuasively in City AM today. My quick take is that, yes, Hayward came under unfair and politically-motivated fire at times, but much of the criticism flung

Saturday

David Blackburn

Convenient timing

Guess who has popped-up as David Cameron departs for Washington? The Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who is defying the gravest of medical prognoses. It’s all suspiciously convenient, given Britain and America’s recent terse relations. What’s more BP, the international bogeyman, is in the firing line – Hillary Clinton will investigate rumours that the company conspired with the British government to include al-Megrahi in a Prisoner Transfer Agreement, and that BP pressured the Scottish executive to release al-Megrahi last summer. She’s wasting her time: this well of fetid intrigue was capped last summer. Britain and Libya had to produce a PTA to normalise diplomatic relations so that trade could be opened

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Hayward in the stocks

American politics often plays like a bloodsport, but the appearance of BP’s Tony Hayward before a congressional hearing today has been in a league all of its own.  Things were already looking decidedly brutal at the start of the morning session, when Hayward was subjected to a solid hour of attacks and accusations from the committee’s members before giving his own testimony. But since then we’ve had everything from pictures of oil-coated birds to protests from the crowd. It has been a compelling, if unenlightening, theatrical event. For his part, Hayward has been neither convincing nor all that unconvincing.  His demeanour is suitably contrite, but his answers have been too

Saturday

David Blackburn

Should Cameron mention McKinnon?

Lord Tebbit poses the question on his latest blog, pointing out that Nick Clegg campaigned against Gary McKinnon’s extradition, and urged the government ‘to do the right thing’.   Well, now he can and it would be a popular decision in the current circumstances. The US-UK extradition treaty should be unacceptable to any government that considers itself sovereign, but this is no time for bluster and confrontation. Barack Obama has leapt about with shrill adolescent abandon; it would be hypocritical for Cameron to return fire in kind. Despite what Obama protests, BP is not solely liable (Halliburton and TransOcean have a case to answer). And Obama’s naked political desperation and

Friday

Daniel Korski

The end of BP

BP is in trouble. Deep trouble. American lawmakers are threatening to take away its dividends and now President Obama is huffing and puffing in order to deflect attention from the role of his administration. BP is struggling to get a word in with the media, pundits, talking heads, politicians and environmental experts monopolising the airwaves.      Not a lot of people will be sympathetic to BP’s plight. The Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill is first and foremost a human and natural tragedy: 11 workers were killed, others were injured and now many Gulf Coast residents will end up losing their homes and livelihoods while their natural environment will

Thursday

David Blackburn

What can Cameron do about Obama’s war against BP?

Very little is my immediate answer. The President’s approval ratings are biting the dust. Powerless to stem the tide of oil and unpopularity, Obama can only victimise a ‘foreign’ oil company. Obama may be embattled at home, but if any doubt the US President’s ability to influence global events, they need only look at BP’s share value and the pension funds derived thereof. BP is mired in an expensive oil disaster, but the President’s rhetoric about the ‘habitual environmental criminal’ and threatening BP with criminal proceedings demolishes market confidence. If the British government had condemned AIG, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch in similar tones, the US administration would have retorted.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Events that are shaking the special relationship

Barack Obama knows language and innuendo: he will know what he’s doing by deploying what Boris Johnson rightly calls “anti-British rhetoric” in the BP disaster. BP has not – for many years – stood for British Petroleum’ – you won’t find the two words anywhere in its annual report. But you hear them plenty tripping off the presidential tongue, as if to point the finger on the other side of the Atlantic. It makes you wonder how highly he values UK-US relations: Bush was genuinely grateful for the fact that Britain was America’s most dependable ally in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s hard to imagine Bush using the rhetoric that Obama

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Obama’s antagonism to BP is rooted in desperation and prejudice

To all bar Tony Hayward, it is clear that BP is finished in America. A Macarthyite degree of opprobrium has been cast against the interloper. As Matthew Lynn notes, BP’s PR flunkies are grovelling across the networks, apologising in that singularly lachrymose British fashion. They should stop demeaning themselves and fight back. BP is to blame for the leak, but it is being demonised by an American President whose desperate populism and prejudice is masquerading as principled leadership; it is the latest British institution to be victimised by Barack Obama. Owing largely to the demands of the insatiable US market – which Obama has done nothing to abate, despite his

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama vs BP Cont.

My old friend Iain Martin wonders if or when David Cameron will pick up the phone to have a word with the American President: Team Obama has chosen to set about a British company with increasing ferocity. Will there come a point when Cameron decides that the British national interest and pride makes a measured intervention desirable? Even if it is simply to point out that BP has given endless commitments to clean up the mess and that ratcheting up the rhetoric against it is far from helpful. Other British based companies and those keen to see what Cameron is made of in terms of foreign policy will be watching