BP, engineers and the ‘small people’

Sir, Perhaps Carl-Henric Svanberg’s “small people” would have been less offensive as “little guys”; if so, he was in double difficulty as a foreigner who did not find “guys” coming naturally to his lips and as a Swede in whose language the “little/small” distinction is one of grammar and not of nuance (“Beyond parody”, leading article, June 21). But the persecution of Tony Hayward, in which you regrettably join, is beginning to become offensive; what was he meant to be doing personally about the spill instead of taking a weekend off?

BP should call its critics’ bluff by simply giving the rig to the Federal government and letting it put out to tender the job of plugging the leak.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Oxford

Sir, Having spent half my working life in America, my view of the public face that the American public would have preferred to Tony Hayward’s would be based on the engineers who placed a man on the Moon, built the global positioning system, or even designed the iPod (“The public face that just doesn’t fit in America”, Patrick Hosking, On the Money, June 19). The statement that the American public would have preferred a “grizzled engineer with grease smudges on his face, and a wrench in his hand” is an extraordinarily British view of an engineer that is patronising, out of date and wrong, whether referring to British or American engineers.