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It's a fair guess that everyone who's anyone in the top business and political circles of the Blair era has long known that BP's disgraced chief executive Lord Browne is gay. That fact did not in any way impede his rise to global eminence. He is not even the first gay boss of a British oil company, though the one I have in mind, of an earlier generation, was necessarily more discreet than Browne.
So it's unconvincing of Browne's 'friends' to suggest that anti-gay prejudice in business justifies the behaviour - lying in court about how he met his former lover Jeff Chevalier - that has brought his career to a bizarrely humiliating end.
We can sympathise with the urge of a distinguished man not to admit that he resorted to an internet escort agency - but even that is not so terribly shocking. Sadly, it's a lot less shocking than the fact that, |
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| We can sympathise with the urge of a distinguished man not to admit that he resorted to an internet escort agency |
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according to Judge Eady, Browne "quite deliberately and casually chose to lie to the court" in which he was seeking to protect his privacy.
When Browne reflects, perhaps he'll conclude that it was not the 'gay' label that brought him down, but the other one that has been attached to him ever since he emerged a decade ago as the model Blairite tycoon: 'Britain's greatest businessman'.
Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't - Sir Christopher Gent of Vodafone had an equal claim - but the label put him on a pedestal from which a mischievous media was always going to knock him down.
The internal row at BP last year was an ominous signal: Browne evidently felt the 'greatest businessman' status entitled him to stay in post far longer than is usual for big-company CEOs, but his board unanimously disagreed - and resented his attempts to marshal the media on his side. That was hubris; and this is nemesis, in which his sexuality is no more than an incidental detail. 
FIRST POSTED MAY 2, 2007
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