Can BP recover from the oil spill damage?
Updated on 04 June 2010
As BP begins to capture oil from the leak in the Gulf of Mexico Job Rabkin writes from Washington for Channel 4 News and says the company's actions, and its chief executives' gaffes, are causing anger in the US.
First we had the "tea party" movement - the heroes of the American revolution reinvented as crusaders led by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Now in the American popular imagination, George III is back. His 21st Century incarnation: BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward.
In all the sound and fury about the spill in the Gulf the devil of the piece is BP - or "British Petroleum" as the president and members of Congress like to say over and over.
The fact the company isn't technically American - even if a third of its shareholders are - has somehow intangibly made it more of a villain than it otherwise would be.
BP oil spill live feeds: watch them all
So substitute BP for the British Crown, and Hayward for the King and you can almost see George Washington and the Founding Fathers coming in for the kill.
The White House and the administration would like nothing better than to cast themselves in that role. They are desperate to deflect attention away from shockingly lax regulation of the oil industry, extensive corruption in the Mineral Management Service, and what is now looking like an anaemic response from the White House to America's worst environmental disaster.
BP attempts to cap the oil leak
Julian Rush explains how BP's latest attempt to stem the flow of oil below the Gulf of Mexico works.
BP has released a number of live stream videos of the leak which show what is happening 5,000 feet below sea level in the Gulf of Mexico.
The pictures are streamed from a dozen unmanned mini-submarines called ROVs - Remote Operated Vehicles - that BP is using to try to stem the leak.
The video shows the oil flowing out from underneath the cap that's been fitted on to the huge blowout preventer (BOP) that sits on the well head.
This is probably BP's last hope to slow the flow of oil. Over the last couple of days, engineers using ROVs have cut away the broken pipe at the top of the blowout preventer. They ran into difficulty when the saw doing it got stuck but eventually, last night, they had carefully lowered the cap on to the BOP.
It's still being adjusted to make sure it doesn't get clogged by the methane hydrate ice crystals, which blocked the first attempt with the big box weeks ago, but some 1,000 barrels a day of oil are now being captured.
After 46 days, this is the first real sign of progress. BP is optimistic it can over the next few days eventually capture up to 90 per cent of the estimated 12,000 to 19,000 barrels gushing from the well every day.
But the problem won't stop completely until August at the earliest when the relief wells being drilled are finally completed.
If this latest cap works as well as the company hopes there are plans to change the way BP pipes the oil to the surface to make it hurricane-proof.
But time and America's patience is running short.
Yet all they can seemingly do is send an unending army of cabinet ministers to tour the affected areas and give angry press conferences denouncing Mad King George and insisting over and over and over that he will pay, despite promises made be BP over and over again that they will.
But BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward hasn't exactly helped. The man the New York Times describes today as "gaffe-prone" has drawn the ire of politicians, commentators and the US public. To British eyes he looks like a down to earth type of chap. He doesn't wear ties. He speaks estuary English. And he says he's "gutted" about the spill. The Financial Times describes him as having a "relaxed, modest manner". Elsewhere he has been described as "self-deprecating", an "unemotional and fairly stoic Brit."
But to Americans he has come across as distant.
“Americans want confidence, we want assurance and we want to know that this guy, leading a multibillion dollar company, himself on a $5m plus salary knows what he is doing, and saying "we don’t have all the tools in our tool box", or something close to that, does not inspire confidence," says Allyson Stewart-Allen of International Marketing Partners, a California based company.
"We want to see contrition, we want to see serious upset, we want to see emotion."
Hayward's widely publicised gaffes have made the situation worse.
"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean," he told the Guardian newspaper last month. "The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."
And telling Sky News: "I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest," was not a great idea.
Now 46 days after the initial accident, vast tracts of fragile wetland are coated in crude and the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks have been destroyed.
But the biggest blow to Tony Hayward's public image in the US was his comment last weekend that he "wanted his life back".
When the video arrived in newsrooms, the journalists covering the story knew they had a stick of dynamite. Now the sound bite has been running on cable, the comedy shows and the blogs for five days. BP was forced to rush out a statement apologising for the comments.
In the White House briefing room, the president's spokesman seized on the comment, and brandished a multi-million dollar invoice to BP.
More from Channel 4 News
- BP oil spill: is Obama's fury justified?
- Gulf spill: BP fits cap on leaking oil pipe
- BP oil spill under criminal investigation
On CNN, Paul Begala, former advisor to President Clinton and now professional pundit, launched into what can only be described as a tirade. "He has lied to the American people and he has insulted America," he ranted. "I hope that oil does get all the way across the Atlantic and I hope it lands on his lawn."
It's a feeling loudly echoed by Louisiana congressman Charlie Melancon, who has now demanded that Hayward lose his job.
"I was watching this week as the CEO of BP said he wants his life back. I'm to the point where I wish the board would call him back," he said on ABC. "If I perform the way this company has performed, and of course look at the stocks and what has happened in this incident, usually the buck stops there."
Across the country, there are angry demonstrations, boycotts and increasingly shrill demands that the US government should issue a Declaration of Independence - and just shut down BP all together.
One former Clinton cabinet minister, Robert Reich, has demanded the US government take over BP temporarily, until the leak is plugged and the spill is cleared up.
Even America's late night comedians have been sticking the knife in.
"BP seems to have done this on their own, they don’t pay attention, they essentially make their own rules, they pay off everybody," Jay Leno said recently on the Tonight Show.
Such is the rage that Americans woke up this morning to Tony Hayward on their TVs, declaring in a very British sort of way: "I'm sorry".
But this time it was a paid commercial: a sign that BP feels the need to spend millions to control its message. The company has had to hire a new head of media relations to calm the storm. Anne Womack Kolton, who's now in charge, is a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and a former spokeswoman for the US Energy Department.
As a representative of UK PLC - and one of Britain's proudest companies - this crisis has not been BP's finest hour. Any hopes Americans had that that the plucky Brit Tony Hayward would fight the oil on the beaches have sunk in a pool of thick black sludge.
And it has done Britain's image in America no favours either. Naively, many Americans used to think Churchill and Princess Di when they think of the Brits. But after these last few weeks, it's more likely to be Fergie and Tony Hayward.
And it will be British pension funds and pensioners - heavily invested in BP - who might end up paying the price.
