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.
