BP comes up with a new boom to save its oily skin – poor pensioners

YOU have to hand it to the spin doctors who work for BP.

You may not want to hand it to them, but they’ve come up with a wizard wheeze. They have – in the current favourite cliche – changed the narrative of the oil leak disaster.

The new angle is the poor pensioners. Ah, God love them, you wouldn’t want them impoverished by harsh action on the part of US President Barack Obama. Sure, they had nothing to do with the explosion and continuing leak. They’re innocent. They learned about it at the same time as the rest of us. If, accordingly, BP were forced to pay up for all the damage they’ve done, the company would be nearly bankrupt and the pension funds that have huge shareholdings in BP wouldn’t be paid a dividend thereby reducing the poor pensioners to penury.

Getting headlines in major newspapers about the importance of BP continuing to pay a dividend was a considerable PR achievement, but the BP lads didn’t rest on their laurels. They managed to elevate this “issue” into a potential conflict between Barack Obama and David Cameron and, by inference, between Britain and America. The problem was that Cameron was reportedly mad as hell and not going to take it from Obama if the latter insisted on BP paying up.

One of the big tests of the early days of Cameron’s premiership was the requirement to make it clear to the Americans they needn’t think they could get away with attacking a British company or threatening the dividends to its poor pensioners.

This would be a test of Cameron’s mettle, so it would, and he would not be found wanting because he could not fail the pensioners.

You’d have been convinced, if you paid enough attention, that nobody but broke old dears ever held a BP shareholding. Or that Cameron might be eager to fight for rich individual shareholders of the type who might normally be expected to vote for the Conservative party.

In the event, of course, the president and the prime minister had a telephone conversation as soft, sweet and warm as a microwaved muffin.

It lasted 30 minutes, with the president explaining to the new prime minister that his fury with BP wasn’t an attack on Britain, and Cameron meeting him half way, expressing his sadness over the environmental and human catastrophe while hammering home BP’s economic importance to Britain. And other countries. Including America. It was, according to the statements issued afterwards, a “warm and constructive” conversation.

It was certainly warm and constructive towards BP.

Suddenly, the US president, who up to that point, when making public statements, had been pointedly calling BP BRITISH Petroleum, was dancing backward as fast as he could.

Nobody should think him calling them BRITISH Petroleum held any untoward significance or amounted to pejorative nomenclature. Perish the thought. It meant anything at all, really. He wasn’t implying that they were BRITISH or anything like that.

Of course he fully understood BP is multinational and, as he warmly and constructively explained to Mr Cameron, his “frustrations had nothing to do with national identity”. Afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches, anybody?

While he was at it, the president added that he meant no harm to BP’s share price, which has tanked (you should pardon the expression) since the Gulf of Mexico incident began.

Those with money, who buy stocks and shares, have taken a long, hard look at BP. They have found themselves looking at a company that blows up its plant, killing 11 of its people, causes unprecedented destruction of the national environment, builds a village for its staff who are going to tackle the disaster, announces that it thinks it has a handle (or maybe it’s a cap) on the whole thing and has been proven to have achieved the square root of damn all in stopping the flow.

Investors have reacted as any rational human being with spare cash would react. Investors have shifted BP out of their portfolios like it was a corporate Typhoid Mary, which it undoubtedly is (Typhoid Mary, an Irish emigrant, did in a lot of human beings in her itinerant career as a cook carrying a deadly disease, but she didn’t do much, as far as history records, to pelicans). Potential investors have raised their hands and indicated they’ll pass up the option of pouring money into a company that’s pouring crude oil into the sea and doing a PR dance to ensure it won’t have to pay for its depredations. That’s investors for you.

One way or the other, Barack Obama was as happy as a clam (not that any of the clams currently coated with BP’s oil are that happy) to issue a joint statement with the British premier wherein they agreed “BP should continue to work intensively to ensure that all sensible and reasonable steps are taken as rapidly as possible to deal with the consequences of this catastrophe”.

Now parse that sentence fragment and you find an assumption that BP has been working intensively. Not so, according to the US Coastguard, which has effectively told the company to get the finger out and get a move on.

You also find a scattering of conditionality. BP isn’t being told to do anything other than take “sensible and reasonable steps”. Is BP going to be the outfit that defines what’s sensible and reasonable? Your guess is as good as anybody else’s. And don’t miss that “as rapidly as possible”.

MEANWHILE, according to a friend of mine who was out clearing up the tar balls already clogging Penscola Beach, it’s pretty obvious to the politically aware that Florida is rich in electoral votes.

“The Fed has mobilised to protect Florida’s shores more than any other state,” he writes. “Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke declared a state of emergency for Florida’s fishing and charter boat industry, freeing up emergency funds for those affected. This is the only state where that happened.”

Because he doesn’t live in Florida, my friend is looking out at an oily sheen on the water two miles from his local beach and coping with a strong oil smell. He is at best unimpressed, at worst shocked, by Barack Obama’s performance on this issue, and sees the hands of the spindoctors at work.

He expected Obama, on his visit to Louisiana, to supervise the cleaning of a pelican, talk tough about BP and do no more. Which is pretty much what happened. The end result could be close to the outcome of the Union Carbide disaster, which killed 22,000 people and maimed countless more. Two middle-ranking managers were recently sentenced to short prison terms.

In the decades following the disaster, Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical on terms which ensured Dow would not carry financial responsibility for the remediation of lands around the old Union Carbide plant.

The way the Gulf of Mexico episode is shaping up, BP’s investors will be mollified, Britain and America will retain their special relationship, and taxpayers will pick up the tab for arguably the worst environmental malfeasance in history.