The advice Lord Browne should have received

Who advised John Browne to attempt to injunct Associated Newspapers?

This is a worthwhile question for BP investors to ponder. For while Browne made mistakes, he may not have been alone.

I have every sympathy with the desire of the former BP boss to keep his private life private. But his strategy for suppressing the story was imbecilic. Someone should have told him:

• That once Jeff Chevalier (Is that his real name? It is a cartoon male escort moniker) had gone to the press, the story was going to come out. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with press relations would have known that. The only sensible response would have been to work on damage limitation.
• That such an exercise would have had a high chance of success. The story would have run but, sensibly handled by BP, it would not have been treated unsympathetically.
• That court action was unthinkable unless he was willing to tell the whole truth to the court. This might provide more uncomfortable details than might otherwise have been in the public domain.

It is possible that Lord Browne ignored all the advice he was given and pressed ahead with the action. The BBC's Robert Peston has written an excellent short post on Browne suggesting that he had become too powerful inside the company.

But perhaps the internal advice was to press on.

In the Telegraph Andrew Pierce has written a worthwhile profile containing this:

He took advice from Anji Hunter, a key BP executive, who was once the gatekeeper to Tony Blair at No 10. They agreed that he should do it [talk about his sexuality] when he appeared on Radio 4's Desert Islands Discs.

This was clearly good advice. It wasn't followed through.

BP investors and management need to consider how Browne's catastrophic misjudgement was made. If it was his alone then clearly the culture of the company needs to change, but his departure may take care of that. But if others were involved, the company's communications operation may need a more thorough re-evaluation.

Comments

[David Moss]

Just before Christmas [1], Matthew Parris rose to the challenge of a friend of his to "… try something new? Lie down in a darkened room, and try to think positively about the Prime Minister". The effort appears to have been destabilising and children are warned not to try this at home.

The experiment went wrong early on in Mr Parris's article. "Britain is a nicer place than when he entered Downing Street nearly ten years ago" was the first result, followed by "his premiership has helped to make it so. Tony Blair has placed his personal stamp on a genuinely new era for Britain – an altered culture, a permanent change in our national mood".

Then, out of the darkened room came: "something tolerant, something amiable, something humorous, some lightness of spirit in his own nature, has marked his premiership and left its mark on British life".

Tell it to the Marines, you may say, but Mr Parris adduced some evidence to support his case, including this: "You would expect me to mention civil partnerships, the scrapping of the "section 28" prohibition on the promotion of homosexuality in schools, the equalising of the age of consent, and the ending of the ban on gays in the Armed Forces … ".

Back then, at Christmas, he said: "And there has been, as gradual as it is signal and (I hope) permanent, a steady reduction in the level of general censoriousness in public life".

Four months later came the perplexing resignation of Lord Browne, following the Mail on Sunday's censorious investigations, about which Mr Parris said yesterday [2]: "What this story is really about is the awkwardness of gay sex in the business world and our general fascination with the lives of the rich and (in Lord Browne’s case) slightly famous … I can see that there really is a lingering problem about homosexuality and business … Friends of mine in business tell me that we in the world of the media and politics, where attitudes towards homosexuality have shifted fast, do not realise as we page onward from news and comment, and into the business section, that we are moving into a different world, some of whose cultural values would shock us. The City is another country".

He is wrong, isn't he? He must have been back in his darkened room when he wrote that. I agree with you, Mr Finkelstein, when you say that: "once Jeff Chevalier ... had gone to the press, the story was going to come out. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with press relations would have known that. The only sensible response would have been to work on damage limitation ... such an exercise would have had a high chance of success. The story would have run but, sensibly handled by BP, it would not have been treated unsympathetically".

And he was wrong at Christmas [3]. If he insists on giving the prize for the UK finally coming to terms with reality to a politician, then surely David Steele is his man, not Tony Blair.

But it's not really the politicians who deserve the prize. It is we, the people of the UK. The politicians can legislate. But that only works if the people wanted that legislation in the first place. Let's get cause and effect in the right order. Otherwise politicians come to believe this nonsense about their importance. And what happens then?

Well, it seems that you tolerantly allow standards in education to collapse. You amiably train 30,000 doctors for 22,000 jobs. You humorously go to war with Iraq. And you lightly enact one measure after another to erode civil liberties.

1. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article1737544.ece
2. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article1733739.ece
3. That's twice he has been wrong. He was too optimistic at Christmas. And he was too pessimistic yesterday. These darkened room experiments are just that. Experiments. And experiments can go wrong. The rest of the time, with the curtains drawn, Mr Parris is brilliant.