Back to petroleum at last: BP's switch back to fossil fuels is a seismic U-turn, says MAGGIE PAGANO

Murray Auchincloss is to be applauded. It takes courage to admit mistakes, and even greater courage to try to fix them, especially when you are in the public spotlight.

But that’s what the BP chief executive is doing. He’s dropping most of its ambitious renewable targets and focusing again on increasing oil and gas production to boost profits.

Where you can take issue with the Canadian boss is his description of this shift as a reset, albeit a fundamental reset.

That’s far too feeble an account: this is a seismic U-turn, one that should take the oil giant firmly away from its fancy Beyond Petroleum slogans and even more fanciful attempts to become a renewables group.

Five years ago, BP set some of the most absurd targets among its peers to cut production of oil and gas by 40 per cent by 2030, while ramping up investment in renewables.

Now Auchincloss is doing the reverse: looking to increase investments in fossil fuels by 20 per cent to £8billion by 2027 while cutting spending on renewables to around £1.2billion a year, more than £4billion less than planned.

Green U-turn: BP boss Murray Auchincloss is dropping most of its ambitious renewable targets and focusing again on increasing oil and gas production to boost profits

BP is not the only one taking President Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ to heart. Rivals such as Shell and Norway’s Equinor have also been trimming back on renewables.

All the big oil companies know that more fossil fuels will be needed, even with greater capacity from renewables, for decades to come to meet growing demand for stable energy sources. Ironically, much of that demand is coming from the rise of electric vehicles and AI data centres.

Yet Auchincloss is not out of the frying pan yet. Shareholders are bitter about BP’s many mistakes, which have cost them dearly.

Since Bernard Looney, the former chief executive, went overboard with his greenery, total returns, including dividends, have yielded just 36 per cent.

Compare that to investors in Shell and Exxon who have received returns of 82 per cent and 160 per cent respectively.

One of the unhappiest is the influential Elliott Management activist group, which holds a £4billion stake in the £70billion company, and has been driving the calls for BP to switch tack.

Whether this U-turn will take the heat off BP or whether chairman Helge Lund can last after overseeing so many errors, is too early to say.

Takeover talk is still in the air, potentially by Shell, or one of the US oil majors. So is talk of switching its listing from London to New York where oil companies carry higher valuations.

Its shares drifted lower on the reset, to 430.9p, well down on last year’s 520p high.

Are they worth a punt? Yes. But only if investors are persuaded that BP can stay the course, resist the inevitable pressure from the green lobbyists – and stick to being Back to Petroleum.

Talk about U-turns. Imagine if a Conservative government had slashed the foreign aid budget to spend more on defence.

Or if it had forced the hand of the NHS England chief executive so she had no choice but to resign, and planned thousands of job cuts across the top of the health service to reduce red tape.

You can imagine how the Labour opposition would have howled. So it’s remarkable to see how Labour has shifted a gear by taking these dramatic decisions, and for once unusually putting country before party.

Sadly what these changes also show – and they are the right ones – is that the past Tory administrations were even more useless than we remember.

Defence spending was always going to increase even before Trump’s demands and any fool could see that Amanda Pritchard, appointed by the Tories, would be hopeless at running, let alone reforming, the NHS.

Both decisions should have a positive impact on British businesses, and their employees.

If the increased defence money is spent here in the UK, this should create thousands of jobs for companies such as BAE, Rolls-Royce, Babcock and Chemring – under attack from US opportunists – to name a few.

Wes Streeting is clearly serious about deep-rooted NHS reform. He can start by banning DEI jobs – it would be a better use of money and healthier for patients if the NHS employed more chefs – and force the British Medical Association to increase the number of doctors being trained.

Nurses should be offered bursaries while GPs should modernise their surgeries to work like mini A&E centres.

Long-term, improving the well-being of the nation is the surest way to keep down spiralling NHS costs.