Chapter 8: What A Long Fight Makes Of A Life

What does a long fight make of a life?

It makes a shape that would not otherwise have existed.

That may sound self-evident, but I mean something more particular. A conflict lasting this long ceases to be an event in a life and becomes one of the methods by which the life is organised. It changes not only mood and memory but routine, reputation, friendships, family conversation, finances, daily work, the uses of time, even one's sense of what old age is for.

If Shell had not happened, or rather if Shell had happened and then behaved decently, I think my life would have been more expansive. There would have been more holidays, for a start. That may sound light, but it carries more weight than perhaps it seems. Holidays stand for leisure, ease, family pleasure, a feeling that one has the right to stop striving for a while. A man who is always attending to a grievance, preserving papers, drafting responses, posting material, dealing with sources, monitoring legal risk or trying to force fairness out of a giant company is not fully at leisure, even when sitting in a comfortable chair.

There were other costs too, and they were not decorative ones. Houses were sold. Money that could have secured comfort went into litigation and survival. Energy that might have built something new went into trying to prove what should never have needed proving. My activities were restricted during the years when I was caring for my mother as dementia overtook her and for my disabled father in his later life. That is another aspect of the story which large institutional histories often miss. They flatten time. They record cases and campaigns but not domestic strain. Yet real life is lived among obligations, frailty, interrupted plans, and the daily needs of those one loves.

The present tense is not free of that reality either. I still live in Colchester with my sister, who still works as a carer. We are both disabled. She is less enchanted than I am by my unusual hobby, but the habit of work remains. Most days still involve emails, website maintenance, source-checking and the occasional phone call or visitor. The campaign keeps my mind busy. Use it or lose it. In later life, routine itself becomes a form of resistance.

So yes, the fight took money. It took peace of mind. It took opportunities. It took ease. It altered the atmosphere of family life. It made it harder to be simply a businessman, a son, a husband, a father, a retired man, or anything else uncomplicated. It created a permanent second shift. There was always one more document, one more threat, one more letter, one more article, one more leak, one more correction, one more instance of Shell seeming to assume that size alone entitled it to moral convenience.

But that is not the whole answer, because the fight also preserved things.

It preserved my self-respect, for one thing. People sometimes speak as if persistence is automatically pathological. Sometimes it is. But sometimes persistence is simply what remains when surrender would feel like agreeing to an untruth. If I had let this go on terms that seemed false to me, I would not have become a calmer version of myself. I would have become a diminished one. I say that not to glorify stubbornness for its own sake but because it is true. There are defeats one can live with and defeats that poison the rest of one's life. I believed this would be the second kind.

The campaign also preserved a record that might otherwise have disappeared. Over time the archive and the websites became useful to other people as well: journalists, campaigners, shareholders, insiders, critics, curious readers, and people with their own reasons for wanting Shell scrutinised more closely. I did not begin with a philanthropic business plan for public-interest publishing. I began because I was angry and would not let the matter die. But something wider grew out of that refusal. The material helped others. The platform helped others. The fact that I had kept going helped others realise they were not alone in finding Shell less admirable than its advertising suggested.

That has given the struggle a meaning beyond personal revenge, which matters because revenge alone is an exhausting fuel. It burns hot and dirty. It narrows the soul. What made this campaign survivable was that it grew functions beyond anger. It became investigation, publication, curation, warning, solidarity, mischief, memory and, on good days, a kind of service.

Even so, I would be lying if I claimed that the fight improved my life in some uplifting, redemptive sense. My lesson is less neat. A long campaign can give a man purpose and deprive him of peace at the same time. It can sharpen him and trap him. It can make him useful and isolate him. It can preserve his dignity and consume years that might have been spent more joyfully. In my case, persistence became victory, burden and identity all at once.

There is a further bitterness which I find hard to ignore. In my view, the original wrong was of a human scale. Painful, serious, consequential, yes, but not beyond repair. Shell, however, seems over the decades to have preferred a much larger aggregate cost, including reputational damage and wider commercial harm, rather than concede enough to set matters right on a scale that would have allowed me to move on. That is one of the strangest features of the whole saga. A giant corporation may have lost vastly more, in all senses, by refusing to resolve something smaller when resolution was still imaginable.

I do not present that as a proved accounting exercise. Some of the estimates are mine, some belong to journalists, some depend on causal chains which outsiders will argue over. But the broad moral point remains. There are institutions so frightened of precedent, apology or apparent weakness that they will tolerate years of cumulative damage rather than perform one act of honest repair. To live on the receiving end of that logic is a peculiar education. One learns that being obviously human is not, by itself, persuasive to a machine this large.

Ageing sharpens the question. When one is younger, there is always the fantasy that justice may arrive in time to be enjoyed without qualification. In old age the arithmetic changes. Time becomes visible. One starts asking not only whether a wrong will be corrected but whether one will still be here in a condition to benefit from its correction. That, perhaps, is why the matter has become simpler in my own mind. I do not want endless combat. I do not require theatrical victory. I want enough justice to make the remaining years properly livable. A genuine apology. Fair redress. A settlement that means something. The freedom to stop.

Would I stop? Yes. I have said so repeatedly. I know Shell may prefer to imagine otherwise. Perhaps it is easier for them to believe I am animated by some insatiable appetite for conflict. But that flatters neither side. I did not spend decades on this because I enjoyed sacrificing comfort. I spent decades on it because I thought the underlying wrong had not been put right and because each new development seemed to confirm that belief. If the matter were honestly resolved, I would rather live than campaign.

That said, the campaign has now outlived ordinary retirement age. It has entered inheritance territory. Another person has already been identified to continue the work if necessary, someone long familiar with the material and, when the time comes, fully capable of carrying it on. There is something grimly comic about that fact, as though the dispute were a family business in its own right. Yet it is also a measure of how completely the saga escaped the limits anyone sensible would once have assigned to it.

What, then, do I want readers to feel at the end of this book? Not simple outrage, though there is enough here to justify outrage. Not admiration alone, though I would not object to a little. What I most want is for readers to feel the scale of diversion: to understand that one determined individual can indeed cause trouble for a great company if sufficiently provoked and sufficiently persistent, but also to see the cost embedded in that fact. This was not a hobby. It was a life partly diverted from its original course and then remade around resistance.

And yet I do not regret keeping the record.

That may be the closest thing I have to a final answer. I regret the necessity. I regret the waste. I regret the comfort lost, the money lost, the simpler life that might have been available. But I do not regret insisting that what happened mattered. I do not regret preserving the evidence. I do not regret refusing to accept that the stronger party can declare a slate wiped clean and thereby make it so.

The fight has made me older, tougher, narrower in some ways, broader in others, less trusting, more methodical, occasionally more amused than the circumstances strictly warrant, and perhaps harder to silence than Shell ever expected.

That is not the life I had planned.

It is, however, the life I have.