If you’re looking for yet more examples of BP’s slowness to grasp the sheer scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster look no further than its chairman’s stock dealings following the explosion.

A full seven days after the accident,  Carl-Henric Svanberg bought about 175,000 BP shares, according to reports in the Swedish press on Thursday. Presumably to take advantage of their fall – to £6.19 from £6.55 on April 20, the day of the explosion.

He also bought about 750,000 BP shares at £5.75 in February, a month after taking the top job at the company.

The shares have now rebounded from their crisis-lows… to, erm, £3.86.

Fortunately, according to an online biography, Mr Svanberg “was always drawn to a challenge and to doing things that seemed hard”.

So he should be really drawn to the challenge of getting BP’s share price back to pre-explosion levels.