Prologue

There is something faintly ridiculous about the way my dispute with Shell has entered old age.

I sit at a keyboard and ask machines questions about a company that has dominated far too much of my life. I ask ChatGPT. I ask Copilot. I ask Grok. I ask Perplexity. I ask whatever new oracle Silicon Valley has produced this week. I give each of them the same material, or nearly the same material, and watch them squirm, contradict themselves, regurgitate old reporting, rediscover buried facts, miss obvious points, and occasionally blurt out something rather close to the truth.

At one level it is comic. A fight that began in the world of petrol promotions, paper files, telephone calls and boardroom courtesies now plays out through artificial intelligence. At another level it is not comic at all. These systems are being trained on the electronic afterlife of forty years of documents, articles, leaks, correspondence, court papers, accusations, apologies, and unfinished business. They are not solving anything. They are exposing the fact that the story still exists, still has force, and still refuses to stay buried.

I did not set out to become the curator of a digital battleground. I certainly did not set out to become, in my late seventies, a one-man media machine feeding Shell's history into competing bots. That would have sounded absurd to the younger man I once was, a man who liked making things, winning contracts, coming up with ideas, seeing them take shape in the world. The version of me now sitting at a keyboard asking questions of machines is not the man I expected to become. He is the man Shell helped to make.

The modern phrase for what I am doing might be "information warfare," though I confess I prefer less fashionable language. What I am really doing is continuing. That is the central fact. I am continuing because the matter was never put right. I am continuing because what ought to have ended decades ago did not end. I am continuing because Shell, despite all its size, wealth, codes of conduct, public slogans and business principles, has never done the one thing that might have allowed me to put down the file at last: negotiate seriously, apologise properly, and make fair redress.

I make the point bluntly because I do not want this book mistaken for the work of a man in love with grievance. I am not. Anyone who imagines that I have spent four decades in blissful enjoyment of litigation, threats, sleeplessness, documents, websites, leaks, and endless argument understands nothing at all. The truth is much simpler and sadder. I wanted a good life. I had earned one. I had one, or the beginning of one. Then I found myself dragged into a long struggle with one of the largest companies in the world. The legal routes that were supposed to produce justice did not do so. The so-called peace that followed did not hold. The years went by. The archive grew. My anger hardened into discipline. My private dispute became public record.

Somewhere along the way, I became useful to other people with grievances against Shell. Some saw me as a crank. Some saw me as a nuisance. Some saw me, rather flatteringly, as a whistleblower. Journalists called. Insiders sent material. Shell watched. Shell worried. Shell denied. Shell postured. Shell occasionally blundered. I kept going. Not because it was healthy. Not because it was noble every day. Not because I had discovered a secret taste for permanent war. I kept going because I could not persuade myself that the alternative, which was to shrug and let a giant corporation stroll away from what had happened, was something I could live with.

That has cost me dearly. It has cost money, time, energy, peace of mind and opportunities that do not come back. It has shaped family life. It has narrowed life in ways that are hard to calculate. The bill for a long campaign is not just legal. It is existential. It changes who you are. It changes what others expect you to be. It changes how a room feels when your name is mentioned. It even changes the rhythm of old age. Other men in their late seventies may take up golf, gardening, or a more sensible relationship with the daily news. I compare chatbot answers about Shell.

But if the present is strange, the beginning was ordinary in a far better way. The beginning was not a crusade. It was business. It was ambition. It was creativity. It was my father and me making ideas that worked. It was the pleasure of being good at something. It was meeting serious people from serious companies and finding that they took us seriously too. There was a time when Shell was not my adversary. It was my best client. There was a time when the name Shell brought to mind scale, prestige, a famous jingle sung by Bing Crosby, and the satisfaction of dealing with one of the biggest brands in the world.

That is why the story must begin there, before the websites, before the leaks, before the spies, before the judges, before the chatbots and the bot war and all the strange electronic machinery of this late chapter. To understand why I kept going, you have to understand what existed before the fight. To understand the fury, you have to understand the trust. To understand the old man at the keyboard, you have to understand the younger man who thought he was building a life.

Before Shell became a fate, it was a client.

Before I became a campaigner, I was a businessman.

Before I built an archive, I built promotions.

And before I spent years learning how power behaves when challenged, I had the simpler and happier experience of success.