There is a revealing tension inside BP’s announcement appointing Ian Tyler as permanent chair. Tyler says he intends to “lead the board’s evolution”, ensuring that BP has the depth, experience and capabilities required to support the company’s strategic priorities and create long term value. It is a surprisingly important admission.
BP has just completed another chair search after removing Albert Manifold less than eight months into the job. It has appointed a new chief executive from outside the company, embarked on another strategic reset and remains under pressure from Elliott, one of the world’s most formidable activist investors. BP’s new chair is therefore effectively acknowledging that the board overseeing this important strategic work is itself unfinished.
What I find even more surprising is what Tyler says in the same announcement about Amanda Blanc. She led the process that produced Manifold, an appointment that ended in chaos less than eight months later. The Times subsequently reported that the emergency action to remove him began with Blanc convening BP’s non executive directors after receiving complaints about his conduct. Manifold, meanwhile, had already begun reducing the size of the board and reviewing its composition, creating an obvious tension with directors whose own positions could ultimately have come under scrutiny.
The Telegraph subsequently reported that Manifold had been drawing up plans to remove Blanc herself before he was ousted. After Manifold’s removal, the board unanimously appointed Tyler as interim chair. Tyler was not an outsider brought in to break the existing process. He had been a BP director since April 2025 and was therefore part of the board that had lived through the Manifold episode and voted to remove him. Blanc then led the permanent chair search from which Tyler emerged as the successful candidate.
Yet Tyler now tells shareholders that he had asked Blanc to stay and praises her “enormous contribution”, while Blanc says she leaves BP with a “strong foundation with Meg and Ian now in place”.
Given the history of the past year, I find that language extraordinary. It is difficult to reconcile an acknowledgement that BP’s board still requires significant evolution with such an emphatic endorsement of one of the people most deeply involved in the governance process that has produced so much turmoil.
There may be entirely reasonable private explanations for Tyler wanting Blanc to stay, and none of this requires questioning the capability or intentions of either of them. Some of the language is also plainly corporate politeness. Companies do not normally use succession announcements to settle scores or publicly criticise departing directors. But even allowing for that, the tone sits very strangely against what has actually happened and what shareholders, and everyone else watching, can plainly see.
Tyler is BP’s third permanent chairman in less than a year. The company has also changed chief executive, endured a deeply contentious AGM and, even after announcing a new chair, finds itself once again having to rebuild its board. Tyler effectively says as much himself in his very first statement as permanent chair, acknowledging that the board still needs to evolve and acquire additional depth, experience and capability.
As a piece of corporate communication it presumably seemed good enough: close the Manifold episode, smooth the edges and project reassurance. The problem is that BP has repeatedly reached for precisely this kind of reassuring institutional language when the circumstances have called for something much more candid. That creates a persistent problem of tone. The words suggest control and continuity while the observable facts suggest instability, failed processes and a governance structure still trying to work out what it needs to become.
I therefore read the statement differently from the way BP presumably intended it to be read. Rather than conveying that the board understands the gravity of what has happened, it suggests an institution still instinctively reaching for continuity, collegiality and managed reassurance at precisely the point when shareholders should be asking whether continuity itself has become part of the problem.
The Financial Times captured some of this in its Lex headline: “BP gets the chair it wants rather than the one it needed.” Tyler is presented as a solid, relatively low risk appointment who can restore cohesion and strengthen the board around him. Reuters Breakingviews reached a similar conclusion, describing him as “calm, measured and collegiate” while questioning whether that is enough for the scale of transformation BP faces.
The wider reporting is important because it shows that the underlying governance concerns are hardly peculiar to this column. The FT has described BP as emerging from “years of operational, strategic and governance disasters”. The Telegraph reported not only that Manifold had been considering removing Blanc, but that investors were calling for wider board renewal, with one US shareholder describing his removal as looking like a “board stitch up”. The Times has reported Blanc’s central role both in the process that appointed Manifold and in the emergency board action that removed him.
None of that proves a particular interpretation of what happened inside BP’s boardroom, and it would be wrong to pretend that it does. It does establish that the concerns we are discussing were visible to shareholders and were being reported as events unfolded.
The argument here goes further by joining those events together. BP has repeatedly experienced serious strategic and governance failures, yet its instinct still appears to be to reassure investors that the institution is stable, the foundations are strong and orderly evolution will deal with what remains. Stability has real value after the turmoil of the past year, and Tyler may provide it. The danger is that BP mistakes stabilising the institution for fixing it.
The problem is bigger than BP’s latest strategy reset
Much of the discussion around BP’s present difficulties still begins with the corporate strategy it announced in 2020, designed to transform BP from an international oil company into what it called an integrated energy company, with sharply lower oil and gas production and rapid growth in lower carbon businesses. I have already written extensively about why I believe BP went too far, too quickly, mistaking an extraordinary combination of near zero interest rates, booming clean energy valuations, ESG enthusiasm and political pressure for a durable view of the energy system.
The precise financial cost of that strategic detour is impossible to isolate because too much else happened over the same period. But the opportunity cost to shareholders is difficult to ignore. Taking the pandemic lows of 2020 as a rough starting point, when the entire sector was deeply depressed, the value of an investment in BP has increased by 2x, compared with 3x at Chevron and 4.75x at Exxon. It would be wrong to attribute that entire gap to the transition strategy, but the comparison gives some sense of the shareholder value BP failed to capture while its American peers remained much closer to their traditional oil and gas businesses.
The transition strategy, however, was unfortunately only one episode in a much longer story of repeated strategic and management failure. Macondo had already inflicted extraordinary damage on BP. By 2018 the company had recorded tens of billions of dollars of charges associated with the disaster, followed by years of asset sales and balance sheet repair.
Rosneft was a very different risk, but also one that BP chose to carry. When Russia invaded Ukraine and BP decided to exit in 2022, the company recorded a net pre tax charge of around $24 billion in the first quarter, including the loss associated with the carrying value of its Rosneft interest. The strategic impact was considerably larger than the accounting charge alone suggests. At the end of 2021, BP’s share of Rosneft represented around 8.4 billion barrels of proved reserves, almost half of BP’s reported group reserves, and approximately 1.1 million barrels of oil equivalent a day of production, roughly one third of the group total. When BP ceased accounting for Rosneft, that enormous contribution to the reported scale and resource base of the company disappeared with it.
These episodes should not be forced into a single explanation. Macondo was an operational and safety catastrophe. Rosneft involved geopolitical and country risk. The transition strategy was a corporate judgement about where BP should invest and what the company should become. The commonality lies in what shareholders experienced as a result. Again and again, BP has found itself forced to repair the financial and strategic consequences of decisions or failures measured in tens of billions of dollars, while losing assets, reserves, production, balance sheet strength and strategic freedom along the way.
The strategic reset now under way is therefore not a fresh beginning so much as the latest attempt to repair the consequences of another major failure of corporate judgement.
That is a much more serious diagnosis than simply saying BP got the energy transition wrong. A company can make one large strategic mistake, replace the leadership responsible and move on. BP’s record raises a different question. It has an extraordinary collection of assets, deep pools of technical and commercial capability and more than a century of experience operating in difficult countries and markets. Yet repeatedly the company has ended up constrained by the consequences of its own past, selling assets, repairing the balance sheet, changing leadership and asking investors to believe that another strategic reset will finally resolve the problem. Shareholders should be asking why BP keeps finding itself in this position at all.
That question leads inevitably back to governance. BP’s board did not irrationally assemble itself, but over time it appears to have evolved reactively around the pressures confronting the company. After Macondo, stronger oversight, regulation, reputation and stakeholder management became understandable priorities. As the political and institutional consensus around climate strengthened, BP also recruited directors comfortable with governments, institutional shareholders, transition policy and the wider politics surrounding a large European oil company. Those are valuable capabilities, and an international oil major cannot operate successfully without considerable political judgement. What is increasingly questionable is whether they have been balanced by enough experience of the commercial and strategic problem BP now faces.
The immediate issue is not therefore whether Tyler can recruit one or two impressive new directors. It is whether the board as a whole is capable of providing the judgement BP has repeatedly lacked at crucial moments since Macondo. That matters even more because neither Tyler nor Meg O’Neill removes the uncertainty around the company’s next phase.
Tyler and O’Neill do not make that concern disappear
Tyler’s attraction to BP is clear. He has extensive boardroom experience, knows the company, has worked alongside numerous chief executives and appears capable of restoring some normality after a period when BP has repeatedly changed senior leadership. But Reuters Breakingviews also points out that Balfour Beatty produced only 13 per cent total shareholder return during Tyler’s eight years as chief executive, against roughly 80 per cent for the FTSE 100 over the same period. It is not a perfect comparison and does not establish that Tyler was a poor executive. It does, however, make it difficult to portray his appointment as BP recruiting a chairman with an unmistakable record of transforming an underperforming public company for its shareholders.
A chairman chosen primarily for stability can be an excellent complement to a chief executive who already has a demonstrated record of undertaking the transformation required. That is why Meg O’Neill’s experience needs to be assessed carefully rather than simply described through a conventional executive biography. She has a substantial oil and gas career. More than two decades at ExxonMobil gave her serious technical, operating and international experience, and at Woodside she ultimately ran a large upstream and LNG company. The BHP Petroleum combination materially increased Woodside’s scale, major projects progressed under her leadership and nobody can reasonably dismiss her as inexperienced in the industry.
BP is nevertheless a different undertaking. It combines global upstream operations, refining, trading, shipping, fuels, customers and a corporate infrastructure accumulated over generations. Its challenge may require not merely running these businesses well, but deciding what kind of company BP should ultimately become. O’Neill has not previously led a turnaround of that breadth. Her Woodside public market record also leaves legitimate questions rather than eliminating them. The FT has highlighted Woodside’s underperformance against an industry comparator during her tenure, while noting the limits of her previous exposure to businesses such as refining and fuel retail. At BP’s April AGM, a shareholder explicitly questioned why O’Neill had been chosen given Woodside’s shareholder performance. BP’s public answer did little to explain the underwriting beyond its conviction that she was the right person.
None of this establishes that O’Neill will fail. She may prove exceptionally well suited to BP. It establishes something narrower but important: she is not a proven turnaround CEO for a company of BP’s complexity, just as Tyler is not obviously a proven corporate restructuring chairman. The combination could work, but it makes the board around them much more important. Reuters Breakingviews put the chairman’s dilemma particularly well when it observed that there is considerable room between behaving as a second chief executive and being insufficiently challenging. BP needs a board capable of providing support without becoming deferential, and challenge without becoming dysfunctional.
This matters now because BP is already moving quickly. O’Neill has set out priorities around the balance sheet, portfolio simplification, investment discipline, operational performance and organisational accountability. Some disposals are already under way and further changes to the shape of the company are likely. That is normal corporate activity and BP plainly cannot stop running itself while the board is refreshed. Operations, safety, debt management and already sanctioned projects continue. Obviously peripheral assets do not need to remain in the portfolio simply because the governance structure is being reconsidered.
The threshold should become much higher as decisions become harder to reverse. Selling a modest non core asset is one thing. Undertaking a transformational acquisition, disposing of a major strategic business, separating a significant part of BP or permanently redrawing the corporate perimeter is another. BP has already spent too much of its history recovering from choices whose consequences outlasted the leadership teams that made them. If Tyler genuinely believes the board still lacks some of the depth and capabilities BP needs, there is an unresolved sequencing problem in allowing that same board to approve the most consequential decisions before its reconstruction is complete.
The more sensible principle is governance before irreversibility. Build confidence in the institution making the decision, test the strategic alternatives through that institution and only then lock shareholders into outcomes that may take years to reverse.
Manifold showed where the power really sits
Manifold’s short tenure helps explain why this cannot simply be treated as a recruitment exercise. He arrived with a reputation for restructuring and decisive portfolio action, began reducing the size of the board, pushed for faster change and appeared sympathetic to significant parts of Elliott’s diagnosis. Elliott supported him at the April AGM, where he nevertheless received only 81.8 per cent support amid wider shareholder unrest. Thirty three days later, he was gone.
Whatever the legitimate conduct issues involved, the episode revealed where durable corporate power lies. A chairman can advocate faster change, management can reorganise the company and an activist can own billions of pounds of stock, but the board retains enormous authority over who runs BP, who chairs it, which directors join it and what transactions proceed. Manifold was chairman, yet the directors around him still possessed the collective power to remove him. They exercised it. The board he had begun reshaping largely survived, an existing director became interim chair, and that interim chair has now become permanent chair.
That sequence should now force a much more fundamental reassessment inside Elliott.
Elliott has been fighting the wrong battle
Elliott’s original BP campaign followed a familiar activist logic. Identify the financial and strategic shortcomings of an underperforming company and set out a better version of the business. Lower spending, reduce costs, sell assets, strengthen free cash flow, reduce debt, simplify the organisation and put greater emphasis back on oil and gas. Reuters reporting around Elliott’s campaign has consistently described demands along those lines. Much of the prescription was sensible and, viewed superficially, Elliott can claim substantial progress because BP increasingly speaks the same language.
That is precisely why the campaign should now worry Elliott. A large incumbent corporation does not have to reject an activist to defeat it. It can absorb the activist’s ideas, turn them into internal programmes and control the speed at which each is implemented. Cost reduction becomes another efficiency initiative. Simplification becomes another reorganisation. Portfolio reform becomes an extended disposal programme. Increased emphasis on oil and gas becomes a change in the investment mix. The company moves sufficiently towards the activist’s stated objectives to demonstrate progress while the incumbent institution retains control over what happens, when it happens and who decides that enough has been done.
BP appears to have done this remarkably effectively. Elliott told it much of what a better pro forma BP might look like, and BP effectively replied that it could work with that. What Elliott did not initially attack with equivalent force was the governance structure determining whether those changes would ever become a genuine reconstruction of the company. It concentrated on the answer before dealing with the people controlling the question.
That is surprising because Elliott has understood the importance of boards elsewhere. At Hess, it went beyond arguments about the portfolio and challenged board oversight and capability directly, nominating five directors and ultimately helping produce a substantial board refresh. At Suncor, its intervention led to three new independent directors, involvement of two of them in the CEO search and the creation of a board committee to conduct a strategic review. Those campaigns recognised that there comes a point when changing the strategy requires changing who has the authority to make it.
Elliott should now have reached that point with BP. The company has given it unusually clear evidence. Manifold, the chairman most visibly associated with accelerating change, is gone. Much of the board remains. Blanc managed the search process again. Tyler, an existing director and interim chair, is now the permanent chairman. He acknowledges that the board still needs to evolve but says he wanted Blanc to remain. O’Neill is pushing ahead with the turnaround while still having to prove that she can lead a reconstruction of this scale. Yet Elliott has still not wrested control of the governance question away from BP.
There is a temptation to interpret BP’s success in containing Elliott as evidence of exceptional political skill around the board table. I am not convinced that is the right conclusion. The board may be better at managing institutional pressure than it is at making the commercial and strategic decisions BP now requires, but the events of the past year hardly amount to a masterclass in control.
The company appointed a chairman and removed him less than eight months later. It has repeatedly changed chief executives, repeatedly changed strategy, suffered unusually contentious shareholder votes and now has a new chairman publicly acknowledging gaps in the board itself. This looks less like an elegantly managed defence than an institution improvising through successive crises while somehow retaining control of the process.
That makes Elliott’s failure more damning, not less. BP has not needed to be exceptionally good at this. It has been chaotic and reactive and has still outmanoeuvred one of the most formidable activist investors in the world. Elliott arrived with a reputation for knowing how to apply pressure to underperforming companies. BP entered the contest with years of strategic underperformance and a visibly unstable governance structure. Yet BP has so far absorbed much of Elliott’s commercial prescription, implemented it on its own terms and preserved the institution that decides what happens next.
The Manifold episode should be particularly uncomfortable. Elliott had found a chairman apparently sympathetic to much of its diagnosis and willing to push faster. He began changing the board and engaged Elliott directly. He then disappeared, while the board retained control of his succession. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the conduct dispute, that is the outcome an activist should care about. Elliott may have won arguments about costs, investment and portfolio priorities while losing the much more consequential argument about power.
Elliott needs to move up a gear
The answer is not another conversation with Tyler about whether BP can accelerate its disposal programme or recruit an impressive senior independent director. Nor is it to produce an even more refined financial model of the BP that Elliott would like to see. BP has heard those arguments, adopted many of them and demonstrated that it can accommodate them without surrendering control of its own reconstruction.
If the analysis above is correct, the next stage requires Elliott to stop trying to improve BP through the board it has and start confronting whether that board should continue to control the process at all.
That does not mean trying to take control of BP in the corporate takeover sense. It means contesting control of the governance machinery that determines the company’s future: who sits on the board, who has enough authority to challenge management, who chooses future chief executives and chairs, and who approves the decisions that may define BP for another decade. Elliott should be asking what a board genuinely capable of reconstructing BP would look like, identifying credible prospective directors and building support among other shareholders for enough change to alter the balance of power rather than merely adding one specialist or dissenting voice.
If that requires challenging incumbent directors, Elliott should be prepared to do it. If it requires putting forward its own candidates, it has done that before. If it requires turning what has largely been a campaign about costs, investment and portfolio priorities into an explicit shareholder argument about the composition of the board, the evidence is increasingly difficult to ignore. The point is not to punish the existing directors for BP’s history. It is to recognise that boards ultimately own decisions about strategy, leadership and the shape of the company, and that BP’s record no longer justifies treating governance as a secondary issue to be tidied up once management has completed the strategic work.
Elliott has spent long enough telling BP what the company should become while allowing BP’s existing governance structure to determine how far and how fast it gets there. The board has survived an activist campaign, the removal of its own chairman, another chief executive change and another strategic reset, and it still controls the process through which it will be “evolved”.
For an activist of Elliott’s scale and reputation, continuing to operate within those terms would amount to accepting that BP defines the battlefield. Elliott’s influence in other campaigns rests partly on the expectation that companies know what happens when it applies pressure and refuses to go away. If BP is seen to absorb that pressure, contain the campaign and retain control of the process, the damage may extend beyond this investment. Reputation is part of Elliott’s leverage, and at BP that reputation is now being tested in public.
What BP’s shareholders should be fighting for
The purpose of changing the board cannot simply be to replace directors for the sake of replacing directors. Nor is the answer to add another person who understands upstream, refining or trading in isolation. BP shareholders have been through enough. They need a board with a clear eyed understanding of how an integrated oil major creates value, who BP is really competing against, where those competitors are stronger, where BP still has genuine advantages and what the company must do over the next decade and beyond to win.
That means looking beyond the immediate restructuring programme and asking much larger questions about the future of the company. What should BP actually become? Where should it be listed and which investors should it be trying to attract?
Once the balance sheet has been repaired, should BP remain primarily a portfolio simplifier or eventually become an acquirer again, and if so what should it buy and why would BP be the best owner? Where does integration genuinely create value and where does it merely preserve complexity? Where should BP concentrate its money if it wants to outperform Exxon, Chevron, Shell and TotalEnergies rather than simply close some of the gap? What does BP need to look like if shareholders are finally to believe that the next decade will not resemble the last one?
Those are not questions that can be answered by filling another skills box on the board. They require people who understand the competitive game BP is playing, how shareholder value is created within it and what the company has to do differently if it wants to win. They require a board capable of looking beyond the next disposal, the next cost target and the next quarterly result and deciding what kind of company BP should become once the current repair work is finished.
That is the board Elliott should now be fighting for. BP has spent long enough repairing the consequences of the past only to create the conditions for the next failure. Its shareholders deserve an institution capable of building the future.