Tony Hayward is reported to be sleeping well despite death threats — he is reviled as the most hated man in America — and a bookmaker’s even odds that BP’s chief executive will fall on his sword after his disastrous handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that might even lead to the company being broken up.
Paradoxically, the 53-year-old Briton looked like the best qualified person to prevent the oil geyser becoming America’s worst environmental catastrophe, not the “bumbler from BP” characterised by one American magazine. For Hayward, whose down-to-earth voice betrays his origins in Slough, Berkshire, is no celebrity administrator.
He learnt the oil business from the ground up as a geologist. Since joining BP in 1982 he has searched for oil-bearing rocks in remote corners of the world, taking on challenging assignments from the offshore rigs in the North Sea to the jungles of South America. He acquired experience as a project manager, a business unit leader, group treasurer and head of BP’s exploration and production arm.
From the day Hayward became BP’s chief executive in 2007, his mantra was improving the safety of the company’s operations. It became his “passion”, he declared, after a young employee was killed in Venezuela, where Hayward was working. “The following week I went to the funeral to pay my respects,” he recalled. “At the end of the service his mother came up and beat me on the chest. ‘Why did you let it happen?’ she asked.”
It is a question that Americans have been asking with increasing vehemence since April 20, when an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 people and released a torrent of oil variously estimated at between 19,000 and 25,000 barrels a day. With repeated television images of oil gushing into the ocean, everyone from President Barack Obama to local fishermen has rained invective on Hayward. Britain is also getting some stick.
A journalist who visited the beleaguered chief executive at BP’s emergency response centre in Houston, Texas, last week found Hayward “almost relaxed” and convinced that the company had been “extraordinarily successful” in its reaction. Hayward could even spot a silver lining behind the dark clouds of oil contaminating the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, declaring “deepwater drilling will be transformed by this event” and that BP would end up with its reputation “enhanced” if it could win “the hearts and minds” of local people.
To some it sounded delusional. Hayward’s hapless attempts at PR have given new meaning to the phrase pouring oil on troubled waters. Adopting a Churchillian tone, he declared: “We are going to defend the beaches. We will fix this.” Daniel Gross commented in Newsweek magazine: “The British leader he calls to mind is Ethelred the Unready.” In another quote from the wartime leader, Hayward said, “When in hell, keep going” — which invited the rejoinder, “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.”
The BP boss, who takes home £4m in salary and bonus payments, is reported to have received strong support from his wife, Maureen, a geophysicist and former BP employee by whom he has two children, Kieran, 19 and Tara, 15. They share a large house in Kent from where Hayward travels regularly to Upton Park football ground to watch West Ham.

Hayward’s insistence on being present in America during the crisis interferes with his habit of reserving weekends for the family. “I am very protective of my time with [my children],” he said once. Sailing is his favourite pastime. The family have sailed in the Virgin Islands, the Grenadines, Thailand, Belize, Turkey and Greece. “It is just great,” he enthused, “just the four of us and the boat.”
Detractors find him increasingly full of wind. Hayward’s relentless optimism proved misplaced as one failed emergency operation to seal the well’s faulty blow-out preventer followed another. Their names — Top Kill, Junk Shot and now Top Cap — seemed as ludicrous as the Heath Robinson tactics employed. Top Kill and Junk Shot involved the injection of mud, shredded tyres and golf balls. The current attempt required a giant pair of robotic shears to cut the spewing pipeline so that a containment cap could be fitted. The results are unclear but no one is holding their breath.
Even Hayward’s accidental good fortune has left egg on his face: yesterday he was reported to have sold £1.4m of his BP stock weeks before the spill cut the share price by 30%. His attempts to express either contrition or defiance never come out quite right. “I’m a Brit,” he told investors on Friday. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me — or however the phrase goes.” The governor of Louisiana has let fly at his “idiotic” remarks. Hayward was forced to apologise for saying the spill was “relatively tiny” compared with the “very big ocean” and after telling struggling residents in Venice, Louisiana: “I want my life back.” The last remark reinforced the impression that Hayward and BP felt they were the victims. “What the hell have we done to deserve this?” he reportedly told fellow executives.
Others found him guilty of bad taste when he argued: “Apollo 13 did not stop the space programme. The Air France airplane that fell out of the sky off Brazil did not stop the aviation industry.” The flaw in his reasoning, it was pointed out, was that Apollo 13 was an example of good technology averting a disaster, while the Air France crash did not imperil an entire coastline.
Born on May 21, 1957, and raised near Reading, Hayward is the eldest of seven children. “The eldest gets to do everything, takes care of everyone,” he said once. “It requires you to be responsible very early.”
At Windsor grammar school he spent more time on the sports field than at his studies. He captained the local football team and also managed to pass A-levels in economics, chemistry and geology. Hayward claimed he chose to study geology at Birmingham “because the university had a good football team”. In geology he “found the evolution of the Earth fascinating” and for a while intended to follow an academic career. But the oil industry, he concluded, offered more chance of adventure. At 25, with a first-class degree and a PhD from Edinburgh University, he found himself in demand by oil companies expanding their exploration efforts. He joined BP and was posted to Aberdeen as a rig geologist. “Working offshore was a great experience,” he recalled. “You were thrown in at the deep end and expected to prove your worth to seasoned hands.”
Moved back to the London headquarters of what was then British Petroleum, he found a “hierarchical” company more reminiscent of the civil service than an oil firm. Escaping the bureaucracy of Britannic House he achieved his ambition of becoming a field geologist — “knocking on rocks all over the world”.
In 1990 Hayward came to the attention of the man whom he would eventually replace at the helm of BP, Lord Browne, feted as the chief executive who directed BP’s rebranding with its green flower logo. Browne attended a leadership conference that Hayward helped to organise in Phoenix, Arizona. Soon afterwards, Browne asked Hayward to work as his personal assistant. “Until then I was a reasonably bright geologist,” he reflected. “I had no idea what a balance sheet was.”
After two years at the grindstone, Hayward was dispatched by Browne to Colombia as exploration and development manager. It was a hectic time: in the space of two years BP’s one drilling rig had grown to 13. Latin America, he later pronounced, was “the place where I learnt to use my heart as well as my head”.
The reticent Hayward could not have been more different from Browne, dubbed the “Sun King” for his lavish lifestyle and criticised after a string of setbacks, notably an explosion at the company’s Texas City oil refinery in 2005 that resulted in 15 deaths. Hayward publicly criticised the company the following year, but it was a scandal that expedited Browne’s resignation in 2007, when he was accused of using company funds to keep his Canadian boyfriend — he denied misconduct. BP also said the allegations about misuse of company resources were unfounded.
Under Hayward, BP’s focus reverted to the petroleum business. Six weeks after his promotion, the new executive director prioritised setting “a new benchmark in industrial safety. We have to have a work environment where people don’t get injured or killed, period”.
Despite his attempt to steady investors’ nerves in a webcast on Friday, Hayward will find it difficult to wash off the stain of the spill. The firm has spent more than $1 billion on the clean-up — expected to double by August — and faces paying billions more in legal liabilities. Five inquiries are investigating such matters as the allegation that two days before the blast the company had ignored a warning that Deepwater faced “severe gas flow problems”.
Throughout, Hayward’s sangfroid has rarely slipped. Asked if he felt insecure, he replied: “I don’t at the moment. That, of course, may change.” For some of the disaster’s victims it cannot come soon enough.