Rio Tinto’s timorous chief executive, Jean-Sébastien Jacques, briefly surfaced from beneath his bed on Wednesday – not to (belatedly) lead the company through one of the biggest crises in its history, just to reshuffle his direct reports.

In his fifth reshuffle of the group executive in four years, Jacques announced the departure of Rio’s development boss, Stephen McIntosh, a geophysicist, who has neither brought the Winu copper deposit to fruition nor finished cleaning up Jacques’ subterranean clusterf--- at Oyu Tolgoi, yet is suddenly retiring. One more pesky adult out of the Frenchman’s way. Remaining bench strength? None. Potential successors? Zero. And Rio’s dozy board slept right through the purges.