Albert Manifold

Yeah, certainly the initial press release, press statement from BP did come as a bit of a bomb explosion.

And certainly, as you say, the language could be interpreted in multiple ways.

Certainly it might have been seen as maybe some kind of personal issue or something to do with staff in a more personal sense.

I don't even want to say what that might mean, but I think we could all listening in have a sense of that.

Certainly his view seems to be that, as I said at the start of the interview, it's more sort of a case of

management styles and obviously CRH have their style of doing things and I covered CRH for many years and I know a lot of their executives and BP obviously have their style of doing things and to me anyway just as an outsider looking in it's in there that the problem is there's some kind of clash or cultural difference or something or his way of doing things now he was at CRH for a long long time like for multiple decades and CRH anyone listening in will know they have a particular

I suppose, culture or reputation.

It's a hard-charging reputation.

They're obviously a big global company involved in a lot of very hostile countries.

And, you know, they have a particular way of doing things.

Maybe, and this is just pure speculation by me, but maybe that style did not translate into the boardroom where you had chauffeur-driven limousines and so on, the very gilded, oak-panelled rooms of BP.

That possibly, and again, I have to have, you know, strong emphasis, this is just my speculation, but maybe there's the melding of those two

was the problem but the bottom line is Albert Manifold will not be going back to BP they don't want him he's not going and he is going to have his reputation at least to some degree damaged by this episode now whether Irish business or other

business cultures will just ignore what happened and say, look, he still has a lot to offer, is possibly one outcome, but certainly his time in British business at this level looks to be over, Claire.

Yes, I mean, that's certainly, you know, that could very well be true.

I suppose the added complication to the picture here is the CEO he was dealing with, Meg O'Neill, was a woman from the US of A, Boulder, Colorado.

So, I mean, she obviously comes from that US business culture, just to add a separate complication into things.

So it sounds to me that these people at the top of BP just could not kind of get themselves onto the same page.

And as you said, when you're a big FTSE 100 company,

There is a certain, you know, there's a certain image that goes with that.