The Tragedy of John Browne

Lord Browne, up until today the CEO of BP, has moved overnight from being a beleaguered executive to being... well, let's just say the Daily Mail headline is "BP Chief Resigns After Lying Over Affair With Gay Lover".

I have to disagree with my colleague Liz Gunnison, who says that Browne is resigning over allegations that he misused company funds on his boyfriend of four years. As ever, it's the cover-up here which is the real problem, not the alleged crime. BP claims to have looked into all the allegations and found them “unfounded or insubstantive,” and given that the source of that quotation is Peter Sutherland, I believe them.

The real problem lies at the intersection of two explosively dangerous institutions: the closet, on the one hand, and the UK legal system, on the other. Browne's ex-lover sold his story to the Mail on Sunday 15 weeks ago, but the newspaper has been enjoined from printing anything ever since by what seems to be pretty heavy-handed legal action on the part of Lord Browne.

Whatever the merits of the Mail's original story, and whatever the ethics of paying for kiss-and-tell stories such as this one, the Mail is surely right when it says this:

That Lord Browne should have felt free to lie deliberately and repeatedly raises deeply worrying questions about the system of secret court hearings which is increasingly being used by the rich and powerful to prevent the public knowing the truth about their activities.
It is also a matter of great concern that such hearings are being used to create a privacy law, made by judges sitting alone and in secret, without reference to Parliament.

Lord Browne would have kept his job until his scheduled retirement in July if he hadn't gone to court to try to prevent the publication of Jeff Chevalier's story. But in trying desperately to remain comfortably in the closet, he ended up lying repeatedly to the UK High Court – and that is why he had to resign.

This story couldn't happen here in the US, because the First Amendment means no court would ever prevent a newspaper from publishing a story such as this one. But the institution of the closet is even stronger in the US than it is in the UK. Check out the "50 Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America", and count the number of public-company CEOs. Hell, try to count the number of public-company employees. You won't get very far. There's a few journalists, and that's about it.

It's shocking and depressing that in 2007 a figure of Lord Browne's stature still feels the need to go to extraordinary lengths to try to remain in the closet. I look forward to the day when it is unremarkable for a public company's CEO to be openly gay; at the moment, it's still, unfortunately, unheard-of.

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