Obama’s bid to defuse BP row
in 30-minute call to Cameron

President Obama last night moved to defuse the diplomatic row with Britain after effectively apologising to David Cameron for his inflammatory anti-British rhetoric over the BP oil spill.

Relations between Downing Street and the White House have become increasingly strained since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April, with Mr Obama infuriating senior members of the Government by provocatively blaming ‘British Petroleum’ for the accident.

The company, a multinational which is 40 per cent owned by American shareholders, has been called simply BP for more than a decade.

Crisis call: David Cameron talks to Barack Obama on the phone at his office at Chequers

During a 30-minute phone call yesterday afternoon, Mr Obama backtracked by reassuring the Prime Minister that his ‘frustra tions’ over the leak had ‘nothing to do with national identity’.

The two men then agreed to make a bet on last night’s World Cup match between England and the USA, with the loser buying the winner a pint of their national beer.

Mr Cameron will travel to the US to meet the President next month. ‘It will be Chicago beer if England wins, British bitter if America wins,’ a source said.

Tomorrow, BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg will effectively hand over his company’s dividend policy to Mr Obama, offering him options on how to suspend payments until clean-up targets are met.

Beer bet: Barack Obama agreed to World Cup ale wager with David Cameron after backtracking over BP row

The detente came as The Mail on Sunday learned that the US plans to withdraw its threat to force the oil giant to pay the wages of hundreds of thousands of oil-rig workers.

The White House had insisted that BP should support riggers thrown out of work by the US Government’s decision to halt all deep-sea drilling while the leak is being cleaned up. Company sources insist that BP should be responsible only for the damages that flow directly from the spill, and not from any ‘ancillary’ decisions taken by Mr Obama.

Mr Svanberg met Chancellor George Osborne and phoned Mr Cameron last week to urge the Government to do more to defend BP against Mr Obama’s onslaught, which included a call for chief executive Tony Hayward to be fired.

More than 1.7  million gallons of oil a day has been gushing from the Deepwater Horizon well. A cap placed on it has captured some of the spill but the pollution is still spreading across the Gulf of Mexico.

A Downing Street spokesman said that the President and Mr Cameron, who also discussed Afghanistan and Iran’s nuclear ambitions yesterday, agreed on the importance of BP to both countries. The company’s share price has nearly halved since the accident.

The spokesman said: ‘The Prime Minister expressed his sadness at the human and environmental catastrophe in Louis iana. The President and Prime Minister agreed that BP should continue to work intensively to ensure that all sensible and reasonable steps are taken to deal with the consequences of this catastrophe.

‘President Obama said that his unequivocal view was that BP was a multinational company and that frustrations about the oil spill had nothing to do with national identity.