OH DEAR. It looks like Sir Phil Watts is planning to try to re-emerge as a cuddly, media-friendly chairman of Shell.

It follows the company’s calamitous announcement that it had cut its proven reserves by 20%. Certainly Watts’s —and Shell’s — PR couldn’t get any worse, but something much more radical is needed.

The Anglo-Dutch company’s advisers, however, are dampening hopes that any big changes to its befuddling, bureaucratic governance structure will be announced when its year-end figures are published on February 5.

There is no excuse. Radical change is possible. Crispin Davis brought to an end Reed Elsevier’s two-board nonsense, and it liberated the company’s share price.

Shell needs to introduce a unitary board, an independent non-executive chairman and one chief executive. If Watts wants to keep his job he needs to seize the initiative and go for a wideranging shake up.

Shareholders are right to be worried about the group’s performance and should keep up the pressure. Shell must change.

Pot Black

AFTER the jubilation of Sunday and Monday, it was down to earth with a bump on Friday for the Barclay brothers. With Hollinger International insisting on pressing on with its own auction for the Telegraph group and other media assets, the Barclays are facing a problem.

Bids from Terry Smith, DMGT and others are going to be substantially above the £253m the twins have offered, and has been accepted, by Black. And I mean substantially more — perhaps even double. The longer the bidding process goes on, the more it will help Hollinger International’s anti-Black board to show that much more could be raised for all shareholders if an open auction is allowed to run.

This does not mean that the Barclays are going to lose out. They remain in pole position, having first-mover advantage.

But it would seem increasingly likely that they will have to raise their bid if they want to cement their takeover of the Telegraph and get their hands on the national media platform they have sought for so long.

Otherwise the brothers will become open to the charge of buying Hollinger on the cheap, and could get bogged down in American legal wrangles for years.

All change