Predictably, Rio Tinto’s board is now at war with itself. With their own reputations top of mind, directors privately lament the “blindness” of their board colleague Michael L’Estrange’s report on the Juukan Gorge incident. And London’s Daily Mail now reports that chairman Simon Thompson’s “flaccid handling of the catastrophe … is understood to have erupted into a boardroom row” in which the board’s senior independent director Sam Laidlaw and director Simon Henry argued the inadequacy of Thompson’s “less than robust response”.

Their fear, The Mail says, was “that the affair has undermined Rio Tinto’s efforts to portray itself as meeting the rules of ESG investing”. Has it ever, and that’s an issue we’ll come to later this week.