SMALL enough to be a prayer rug, the Iraqi carpet occupies a special position in front of Christophe de Margerie’s large and cluttered desk. It’s a crudely woven piece of tourist tat, strangely out of place in the office of such a powerful man, but Total’s head of exploration is a little bit mischievous. He likes to point it out to visitors.

“You can buy it for a dollar in the Baghdad market. It’s the famous goddess of Babylon,” he says.

For Total, Iraq is more than just another oil-rich and desperate country. In its former guise as Compagnie Française des Petroles, Total was one of the founding shareholders of Iraq Petroleum Company, which discovered oil at Kirkuk in 1927. And de Margerie, 54, has not given up on Majnoon and Bin Umahr, the two massive oilfields over which Total was negotiating a production contract — never signed — until embargo and war intervened.

“If we do not do it (develop the Iraqi fields) it will be considered a mistake, more than that, a mismanagement.”

Nothing is happening on the ground because of security problems. He will not put the lives of his employees at risk, but he reckons that investors will ask questions if Total loses its position. “It is giving us additional pressure,” he says.

The pressure is mounting on de Margerie, not only in the struggle to acquire reserves and boost oil and gas output, but internally in the company. He admits after a long, circuitous conversation that he is the choice of Thierry Desmarest, Total’s chairman and CEO, for the top job in France’s biggest and most prestigious enterprise. “The date is up to Thierry to announce,” he says. “We have a big chance to have a man like him at the head of the company. I hope the next one does as well.”

They are like chalk and cheese. Shy and a bit severe, the current chairman is a reluctant speaker, hesitant in English, while his apparent successor talks a blue streak, cracking jokes and puns in an American accent.

Total is as big a national champion as they come, but its prospective chief is unimpressed by the current political fashion in Paris for business that wraps itself in a Tricolour. He jokes that he is worried about delivering a speech in English at a Paris oil conference for fear of causing half of the audience to leave the room.

English is sometimes used in the Total boardroom, he says, adding mischievously: “If I am talking to Desmarest, I will certainly not speak in English unless we want to facilitate the work of MI5 or CIA.”

The French press baits de Margerie, calling him a bit posh (he has links to the Taittinger champagne family) while suggesting he struggled initially at Total, lacking the laurel leaf of a diploma from Ecole des Mines, France’s finishing school for would-be oil barons.

He dismisses this as “just a Franco-French thing, like going to Oxford and Cambridge”. Instead he is proud of being “un homme du terrain” working in the trenches in the company’s stamping ground in the Middle East.

If de Margerie seems to some people an odd fellow, he is also distinctively Total. There is an old chestnut that sums up the oil majors: Exxon is about systems, BP is about deals and Total is about relationships. For de Margerie, the world’s current energy plight has a lot to do with the failure of relationships.

The oil price has become a monster, he says, feeding on its own entrails. If we want to produce more oil, we need to stop lecturing and take the trouble to persuade producing countries that it is in their interests to do so and let the oil majors through the door.

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