The man who could sell the British public on fracking

Iain Conn, who will succeed Sam Laidlaw as chief executive of Centrica, would have been a dead cert for the top job at his current employer, BP, were it not for the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. The subsequent PR fiasco terminated the BP career of the then chief executive Tony Hayward — who seemed crushed by the episode, but recovered to make a double fortune at Genel Energy and Glencore. Had Hayward served a full term, Conn (BP’s head of refining and marketing) would almost certainly have followed him. As it was, BP found it more politic to appoint an American, Bob Dudley, to repair relations in Washington while simultaneously arm-wrestling with the Kremlin-connected oligarchs who were BP’s co-investors in Russia. If that would have been a tough assignment, the one Conn will take on at Centrica is just as challenging: seeking to justify domestic energy price rises, and his own £3.7