Albert Manifold wasted no time stamping his authority on BP after becoming the UK energy company’s chairman last October. He soon replaced its chief executive, slimmed down its board of directors, refocused on oil and gas from renewables and shook the place up. “It’s the Albert Manifold show,” said one investor.
The Manifold show abruptly lost its main character this week as he was ejected by BP’s board due to “serious concerns” over his behaviour, including accusations of bullying. “BP chair removed” was the headline on the announcement, which cited “unacceptable” conduct. It was as blunt as he could be.
Tensions in corporate boardrooms are common, along with resignations of chairs or chief executives who lose in power struggles, but this is an unusually personal and public showdown.
Manifold decried BP’s “false narrative”, saying that he was removed “without warning and without explanation” after BP’s board met to consider staff whistleblower complaints.
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He is not one to take criticism lying down: “I do not accept ... that lies can be told about me,” he said in a statement.
Whatever happened, it is plain that BP’s board should not have appointed him in the first place. It was no secret that the former chief executive of Irish building materials group CRH was a dominant leader accustomed to being in full control.
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His style worked well for CRH during his decade in charge, as the company transferred its primary listing from London to New York and its valuation surged. But BP is a larger and more complex enterprise in a different industry and he had not been a non-executive chairman before.
“I’ve never known a company take such a risk,” said one City adviser to whom I spoke this week.
That was a widespread view as investors and executives of other companies mulled the affair. “This farrago does not fill one with confidence about the governance of BP,” said one shareholder. The mood would be different if the company were stable, but it has replaced two chief executives and two chairmen in three years in a struggle to improve its performance.
Some of the blame lies with Amanda Blanc, chief executive of the insurance company Aviva. Blanc is the senior independent director of BP’s board and led the search for a successor to Helge Lund, BP’s former chairman. Announcing Manifold’s selection last year, she praised his “relentless focus on performance”. He turned out to be rather too relentless.
BP needs much of the medicine that Manifold prescribed, and the board was initially happy to recruit a tough change agent to remedy its drift. It has suffered for a long time from a surfeit of vision and a paucity of operational focus, and was under pressure to improve matters from activist hedge fund Elliott Management.
But one headhunter this week asked whether it did its due diligence. Manifold never had the aptitude to be a non-executive chairman in the classic style of the UK corporate governance code. Rather than heading a board that oversaw its chief executive’s strategy, he set his own direction, while recruiting Meg O’Neill from Woodside Energy as the new chief executive.
There is a fair argument that the UK’s system, with its division of power between non-executive chairs and chief executives, and balancing role for the senior independent director, is fussy and risk-averse. The imperial power of the combined chair and chief executive at many US companies, while open to abuse, has not done the US economy much harm.
But that was not the job description, and BP now has a tough and determined chief executive in O’Neill. Blanc herself pulled off an impressive turnaround at Aviva and recently offered fulsome praise to George Culmer, its modest and effective chairman: “The strength of relationship between chair and ceo [chief executive] is the bedrock [of] high performance.”
Manifold calls the idea that he wanted to act as executive chairman of BP “nonsense” and he did not get much chance to build a strong relationship with O’Neill, who started work in April. He must now repair his damaged reputation and so must BP’s board, which looks like it jumped impetuously into an optimistic gamble on his appointment without taking sufficient care.
For UK governance aficionados, the affair shows the power of the senior independent director when things go wrong in the boardroom. Having led the search for Manifold on BP’s nominations committee, Blanc is in line to do so again for his replacement. She should ask herself whether that is a good idea. BP needs a better outcome this time. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
