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.