Deepwater: 'We are all guilty....'

BP, Halliburton, and Transocean were jointly responsible for the Deepwater blowout, says the official enquiry. No surprise there, then. Who else? The BBC World news reported that the Feds also got a shellacking for complacency but this never appeared in the print media. So nobody comes out with any credit. Two people especially.

I said at the beginning that O’s stance was unpresidential. By slating ‘British Petroleum’, knowing full well that it had ceased to be such when it took over AMOCO, he displayed at the best an appalling piece of duck-shoving. By allocating blame before the inquiry had even been set up, he exposed himself as having unpleasant demagogic tendencies.

The second villain-of-the-piece was the wretched Chairman of BP, Sven the Invisible. It is the Chairman’s job to speak for the company in times of crisis, not that of the CEO. So what does he do? Goes off on a Far East cruise on his yacht with his squeeze. And why was his Director of Communications so silent? Isn’t it his job to spin his masters out of trouble?

The crucifixion of Tony Hayward was despicable; true he did not handle the PR at all well. But he is an oil-man not a PR spiv and he was busy on rectifying the culture of complacency and cost-cutting on safety that was introduced by John Browne, his predecessor.

BP has apparently been voted as one of the American companies most hated. No surprise there, then. Whatever happened to British Petroleum?