The Globe and Mail

“I think I will be judged by the response. I don’t feel my job is on the line, but of course that might change.”- Tony Hayward in mid-May on his potential longevity as BP’s CEO

In the immediate aftermath of the April 20 explosion that sent the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, BP boss Tony Hayward was doing everything right.

He set up shop in a Ramada Inn in Louisiana to oversee the effort to prevent BP’s broken Macondo well from turning the Gulf into a gooey black stew. He vowed to stay in the United States until the clean-up effort was finished. He accepted “full responsibility” for the leak and delivered an army of technicians and engineers to the disaster area. He kept the Obama administration fully informed about the progress, or lack thereof. In early May, the Economist magazine declared him “the right man to lead BP out of the oil slick.”

Today, Mr. Hayward is dead man walking.

Several ambitious attempts to stop the subsea gusher have failed. As much as 19,000 barrels a day of oil are leaking from Macondo, up from the initial estimates of 5,000 barrels. On Tuesday, Barack Obama declared the spill “the greatest environmental disaster of its kind in our history.” The same day, the U.S. Justice Department opened criminal and civil investigations into the spill.

And BP, the industry’s top commercial oil producer (by volume produced), has lost more than a third of its stock market value since the Deepwater Horizon went down, more than $60-billion (U.S.) has vanished. The company that until recently was Britain’s biggest industrial player, flagship enterprise and corporate ambassador is now being touted as a takeover target.

Mr. Hayward will be lucky to make it to Christmas. Ousting him before the leak is fixed would be a distraction too far. But the knives are out for him and he has hinted as much. To be sure, he is unloved by the Obama administration, every environmentalist on the planet and anyone - resort owners, fishermen, wildlife guides - who depends on clean Gulf water for their livelihoods. Probably the only guy who adores him is Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein, who was the America’s most hated man until Mr. Hayward graciously stepped into the role.

Is it fair to send Mr. Hayward packing even though the precise cause of the leak - and hence the company or contractor at fault - is not yet known?

The answer is yes. While Mr. Hayward’s response to the spill was swift, he made a bad situation worse. Shortly after the leak started, he blamed Transocean, the operator of the rig, for the mess. Never mind that it’s still an open question what went wrong; BP or Halliburton, the contractor responsible for the well cementing, could equally be the baddies.

Then, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper, he made a comment that suggested he thought the dangers of the spill were exaggerated: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”