“You’ve got to go where the oil is.” So said Dick Cheney a few years before he became America’s vice-president. At the time he was speaking in his capacity as chief executive of Halliburton.

Now his successor at the US oil services group is putting those words into practice. Dave Lesar intends to move his office to Dubai, in the resource-rich Middle East. There is a precedent for drillers upping stumps in this way. Schlumberger decamped from Paris to Houston in 1940 – although that probably had more to do with the arrival of the Wehrmacht than any commercial considerations.