What do Tony Hayward, Jim Ratcliffe, Tony Woodley and investors in a FTSE 100 tracker fund have in common? In the case of the first three, the answer: not enough. Two weeks ago, it was union leader Woodley’s call for strike action over Ineos owner Ratcliffe’s plan to amend the Grangemouth refinery pension scheme that forced BP chief executive Hayward to close the 700,000-barrel-a-day Forties pipeline – pushing the oil price close to $120 for the first time. Since then, though, all four of these apparently unaligned vested interests have found that they have a lot more invested in oil than they originally thought.

Two days after the Grangemouth strike, Hayward saw his £2.1m personal shareholding in BP increase in value by around £125,000 as he announced a 48 per cent rise in profit. Ratcliffe – while the Grangemouth strike was costing the country around £600m – was named as the 10th richest man in Britain with a personal fortune of £3.3bn, having previously been described as just the 45th richest. Woodley, and his members, have now had plans to cut £40m in benefits from their pension scheme shelved. And as for the FTSE 100 investors? Well, this week, they discovered that more than one third of their money is now going into oil and natural resources – more than they’re investing in any other sector.