As the Sun Sets on Summer in London, Succession Has Been the Theme of the Holiday Period

Autumn returns to the City with a longer to-do list than usual for Chairs, in a year when Britain has spent the summer changing its mind about who leads.

Today is the first day of Autumn here, and Britain is about to be told officially what everyone in the City has spent three months feeling: that this has been the hottest Summer these islands have ever recorded. In terms of temperature and governance. On 13 August the thermometer at Kew Gardens reached 38.1°C, the fifth-hottest day in British history.

And now, quite abruptly, it is over. The plane trees along Cheapside have started to turn. The long holiday out-of-office replies are expiring. Parliament returns, the conference season looms, and on 28 October a new Chancellor will deliver a Budget for a new Prime Minister. Autumn in London always arrives with a to-do list for everyone post-summer lethargy. This year the list for Chairs is longer than usual.

Welcome back to our Letter from London.

It's Been a Season of Succession (Not Netflix's)

Spare a thought for Britain's nomination committees, formal and implied, because 2026 has been the year the whole country decided to change its mind about who was in charge. Downing Street went from Starmer to Burnham in July, taking the Treasury with it, which means the Budget on 28 October will be written by a Chancellor three months into the job for a Prime Minister who was, in June, still the Mayor of Greater Manchester.

The Church got there first in the Canterbury succession. Sarah Mullally was elected in January and installed in March, the first woman to hold the leadership of the Church of England in fourteen centuries, which rather puts the FTSE's diversity targets in perspective.

Threadneedle Street replaced Sam Woods with Katharine Braddick at the PRA in June.

Reform UK changed its own Chairman in May, then its leader resigned his Clacton seat in order to stand for Clacton, on the reasonable grounds that the electorate might not have made up its mind the first time.

Which brings us to Count Binface, the bin-helmeted perennial candidate who has now stood against Johnson, Sunak, Burnham and, in the Clacton by-election, where his platform is essentially " I'm not Nigel Farage ", Farage himself.

So far, he has declined to put his name forward for the chairmanship of BP, which is a mercy: on current evidence he would have cleared the reference checks, held the line on conduct, and lasted longer than eight months. The lesson, delivered by an interplanetary refuse receptacle, is the one this letter keeps arriving at. In a season when everyone is being replaced, the only real differentiator is whether anybody planned for it.

Ninety-Nine Days, Three Chairs and a Searcher Who Resigned: BP's Succession Finally Lands

On 2 September, ninety-nine days after the board unanimously removed Albert Manifold as Chair and Director with immediate effect on 26 May, BP announced that Ian Tyler, its interim chair throughout the summer, had been appointed Chair with immediate effect, following what the company described as an extensive search covering both internal and external candidates. In the same announcement, Dame Amanda Blanc, the senior independent director who ran that search and the one before it, confirmed that she will not stand for re-election at the 2027 AGM and will leave the board once a successor as SID has been found.

BP found its new Chair hiding in plain sight, in the room. Tyler joined the board as a non-executive only in April 2025; he is the former chief executive of Balfour Beatty, currently chair of Grafton Group and senior independent director at Anglo American, and previously chaired Cairn Energy and sat on the board of BAE Systems. BP's announcement notes that he has worked alongside more than fifteen chief executives, and that he will review his other commitments to make sure he can give the role the time it needs. Dame Amanda called the decision unanimous, and praised the " considered leadership, judgement and integrity " he had shown as interim. Tyler, for his part, said he had asked her to stay; she judged that after four years, and having just completed the management of the chair search, this was the moment to plan her exit.

Getting there was unkind in the way that only a slow leak can be. On 1 June, Tyler confirmed to the Financial Times and to Reuters that the board had asked Dame Amanda to lead the search, the same Dame Amanda who had led the search that produced Manifold eight months earlier. Within hours, several of BP's largest shareholders were briefing the FT that they doubted she had the mandate to make a second appointment to the same post. Then the detail started arriving. Reuters reported that Manifold had met Elliott Management, the activist holding a stake of around 5 per cent, without directly informing his fellow directors. In July, the Telegraph reported that before his removal Manifold had been preparing to remove Dame Amanda herself from the board, and to impose six-year term limits on directors. Manifold has not gone quietly: he says he was removed without warning or explanation, and disputes entirely the characterisation of his conduct. On 6 July, Sky News reported that Tyler had signalled he would like the job permanently. On 31 July, BP announced that Tyler would chair the nomination and governance committee from 1 August.

The interim chair, publicly reported as a candidate, took the chair of the committee responsible for board appointments five weeks before being appointed to the permanent role. BP's answer is that Dame Amanda managed the chair search, and the announcement is explicit on the point. 

That is the right answer, and it is why the sequencing survives scrutiny. But it survives narrowly, and only because someone else could credibly own the process. A board that lets its interim chair lead the nomination committee without a visibly independent search owner will not be given the same benefit of the doubt.

And a price was paid regardless. Inside sixteen months BP will have lost two chairmen and the senior independent director who appointed both of them. Dame Amanda has left on her own terms, with warm words in both directions, and there is no suggestion of anything else. But the shape of the outcome is unmistakable, and it is worth understanding before you run your own second search: the person who owns a failed appointment rarely survives owning the replacement, however well the replacement turns out.

Show Your Working: Investors No Longer Ask What You Decided, but How

This season the market stopped judging decisions and started judging the decision-making process. External parties are successfully forcing boards to reveal how they reach decisions, and this season produced the evidence.

I'm going to start with BP again, because it is the cleanest case. At the April AGM, a month before the conduct crisis broke, shareholders defeated two management resolutions: one that would have reduced the company's climate reporting, and one that would have permitted fully virtual annual meetings. Both were, at root, resolutions about visibility. Investors declined to give up either the disclosure that shows them what the board is weighing, or the forum in which they can ask about it in person. Some 18 per cent also voted against Manifold's own election, with Glass Lewis recommending against him on the grounds that he was accountable for the exclusion of a shareholder-filed climate resolution. In hindsight, the market saw something in April that the board only confirmed in May.

The broader picture is consistent. Minerva Analytics' review of 186 AGMs across the UK 350 between January and May found dissent that was selective rather than sweeping, but sharply consequential where it landed, a FTSE chair removed within days of an AGM, and one activist campaign that replaced an entire board. High dissent affected 11.34 per cent of remuneration policy votes but only 5.85 per cent of remuneration report votes: investors are markedly more willing to challenge the framework being proposed than the outcome already delivered.

Strong support cannot be taken for granted where trust, transparency or governance mechanics are in question.

Thomas Bolger, Stewardship Lead, Minerva Analytics

Individual results bear it out. Smith & Nephew's directors' remuneration policy passed with 59.70 per cent support, and its new performance share plan with 60.14 per cent, both technically carried, both triggering the Code's six-month engagement-and-report obligation. Aviva Investors' own season review records support for shareholder resolutions rising to 24.2 per cent market-wide, up from 22.7 per cent a year earlier, with Aviva itself backing nearly 40 per cent.

What connects all of this is a shift in what investors are actually buying. They are not primarily assessing the decision. They are assessing the decision-making. And the 2024 Code has handed them the vocabulary: new Principle C requires reporting to focus on the outcomes of board decisions in the context of strategy, and the FRC's March paper on comply-or-explain quality made plain that the regulator has run out of patience with boilerplate. A board that cannot show its working now fails on two fronts simultaneously, a Code point and a vote.

The practical consequence lands in an unglamorous place: the minute book. If the annual report has to evidence how the board reached a conclusion, then the minutes have to contain a conclusion worth evidencing. Not a list of papers tabled and noted, but the alternatives considered, the trade-offs weighed, the dissent recorded, the stakeholder interests balanced under section 172. Company secretaries have been saying this for a decade.

A New Government, an Unwritten Budget, and a Market That Sustains

We wrote in May of a Prime Minister whose authority was in open question. He resigned on 22 June. Andy Burnham entered Downing Street on 20 July, with John Healey at the Treasury succeeding Rachel Reeves, and the first Budget of the new administration is set for 28 October. Early signals are a mix of cost-of-living relief, VAT removed from domestic electricity from 1 October, a bus fare cap, business rates relief for pubs and music venues, and a stated commitment to the fiscal rules, alongside the Prime Minister's own acknowledgement that people may have to pay " a little more " in tax.

For boards, there are practical consequences. The deregulatory settlement that shaped the last two years, the dead audit bill, the closed shareholder revolt register, the lighter Stewardship Code, was the previous government's agenda, and a new administration signalling interest in governance, consumer outcomes and financial-crime controls may not inherit it entirely. Build for principle, as we said in May, not for the prevailing political weather.

The market, meanwhile, has been characteristically indifferent to the drama. The FTSE 100 has spent August in the 10,700s, off a twelve-month high near 10,910, with oil-linked names swinging on the expiry of the Middle East ceasefire and the associated crude volatility. More encouragingly for London's long-running listings anxiety, you can now count seven new listings on the LSE in the first half, three on the main market, four on AIM, raising £577 million, a 215 per cent increase on the same period last year. That is not a renaissance. It is, after several years of unrelieved pessimism, at last a pulse.

In Summary: Three New Lessons for the Chair's Checklist This Quarter

A chair vacancy is a governance event with a timeline on it. BP ran for over three months on an interim. The cost is not only reputational; it is optionality, credibility with holders, and the awkward situation of a caretaker who is also a candidate. Know today who your Chairs for tomorrow might be, and decide in advance whether they can, or even want to, be a candidate.

Diligence the disposition, not just the delivery. The record that ended Manifold's tenure was one of conduct, not competence. Reference processes that only test performance are testing the wrong variable for a non-executive role.

Investors are buying, and entitled now to see, your decision-making, not your decisions. Defeated visibility resolutions, sub-60 per cent pay votes, and dissent concentrated on forward-looking frameworks all point the same way. The new governance Code Principle C and the FRC's impatience with boilerplate give investors the vocabulary. The board's minute book is the source document.

Your correspondent serving the London Boards and Chairs this month, Stephen Langton

Adviser, CHAIRS Global, London, September 2026

Letters from London is published by CHAIRS Global for distribution to members and advisers. Views expressed are those of the correspondent. Sources include the FRC, the FCA, the Met Office, the European Commission, BP p.l.c., Reuters, the Financial Times, the Telegraph, Sky News, Minerva Analytics, Aviva Investors, EY-Parthenon, the CBI, Slaughter and May, Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Latham & Watkins, White & Case, Gibson Dunn, Deloitte, KPMG and the Corporate Governance Institute.

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