- Tim Webb
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 February 2010 20.35 GMT
- Article history
Lord Browne has published his memoirs, charting his 41-year career with BP. Photograph: Bruno Vincent/EPA
Lord Browne has admitted he stayed at BP too long because he had become obsessed with running the oil group. He has also suggested in his revealing memoirs published this week that his arrogance and a culture of complacency contributed to BP’s failure to prevent a huge oil spill in Alaska.
Lord Browne quit suddenly as chief executive of the company in May 2007 after a newspaper revealed he had lied about how he had met his boyfriend, Jeff Chevalier. The board, then led by chairman Peter Sutherland, had already forced him to announce that he would retire by the end of 2008 after a series of operational disasters on Browne’s watch, including an explosion at the company’s Texas City oil refinery, resulting in 15 deaths and 170 injuries, as well as a large oil spill in Alaska.
Browne’s book, Beyond Business – a reference to his rebranding of BP as “Beyond Petroleum” – charts his 41-year career with the oil group, 12 of them as chief executive. He lays bare his unhappiness and admits he made mistakes. But the book also reads like an attempt to vindicate himself and restore his reputation after it had been so roundly trashed in the wake of his shock departure.
He said it had been an “error of judgment” to do an interview with the Financial Times in 2002, which was gushing in its praise of Browne, who had rejuvenated BP and turned it into one of the largest oil companies in the world. The fateful article dubbed him the Sun King and the sobriquet stuck. He said the article had “set me up as an arrogant target”, adding that “all that went wrong with the company would ever after be personalised”.
But the book – trailed on the cover as “an inspirational memoir from a visionary leader” – reveals plenty of evidence that Browne himself was responsible for much of the aura which surrounded him. As he battled to keep his relationship with his boyfriend out of the newspapers in early 2007, he took solace from the external calm exhibited by then prime minister, Tony Blair, who was facing a public backlash against his support of the Iraq war at the time.
Browne recounts many fascinating meetings with world leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. Possibly, he began to see himself more as an international statesman than a chief executive of a company.
Browne admits his loneliness drove his obsession with BP, which he described as his “family”. He wrote: “I became increasingly aware of the all-consuming action of being at the helm of BP and the emptiness of my private life.” He also reveals he believes he should have left the company sooner. “I did not know how to leave … First, there always seemed to be something I wanted to follow through … That is what a lot of people in similar positions think, but it is a bad reason for staying.”
He also hints at the mounting internal disquiet at BP over his refusal to step down. When the then 58-year-old gave a speech in 2006 arguing that executives should not be forced to retire because of age, he writes in a typical piece of Browne disingenuousness that some BP insiders believed he was trying to extend his tenure. “I thought that demonstrated a touching, if somewhat undue, sensitivity to everything I said,” he writes, before admitting in the next sentence that he wanted BP to scrap its mandatory retirement age of 60 for executive directors.
It is telling that there is no mention in his book’s 254 pages of former chairman Sutherland. Browne only blandly records: “25 July 2006: BP announced that I would retire in December 2008.”
Tantalisingly, he reveals that he and his then opposite number at Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, discussed a possible merger during a stroll beside Lake Como in Italy in 2004. But in spite of allocating a group of employees to look at the plan in detail, a handful of his own board members blocked the move and it went no further.
In the chapter aptly titled “US disasters”, Browne writes that when he received his first call about the explosion at the Texas refinery: “My blood ran cold.” He admits BP had relied too much on “personal safety” – telling staff how to be safe at work – and not enough on “process safety” – making sure equipment was safe. But he glossed over the findings of the Baker panel, appointed by the company to investigate the causes of the disaster, which was damning in its criticism of BP’s operation of the refinery. Browne blamed a failure to fully integrate the refinery with the rest of BP and said that the panel had found similar deficiencies at other companies’ refineries. But he acknowledged: “However, the tragedy happened at BP.”
He does admit he should have done more to prevent an estimated 267,000 gallons of oil leaking from one of its pipelines in Alaska. He writes that he had put too much faith in its leakage monitoring systems and that other executives should have stood up to him more. “I wish someone had challenged me and been brave enough to say: ‘We need to ask more disagreeable questions.’” Possibly his closest lieutenants who were vying to succeed him – the “turtles”, so-called after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because they would immediately appear on the scene whenever needed – also allowed themselves to be blinded by the Sun King.
Browne’s strongest self-criticism for any of BP’s operational problems and accidents follows, but typically it is inferred and not explicit. “As a leader it is hard to find that delicate balance between confidence, humility and arrogance. You need confidence to make decisions to keep moving the business forward … yet arrogance may cause you to make a decision before considering the range of possibilities.”
Browne’s fall from grace
Lord Browne of Madingley’s resignation in May 2007 was a humiliating way to end his 12 years as head of BP.He was forced to step down 18 months sooner than he had originally planned, after he admitted lying in court over his relationship with Jeff Chevalier, a former boyfriend. For one of Britain’s captains of industry, who was on first-name terms with Tony Blair and other world leaders, it was an almighty comedown.
The 61 year-old had kept his sexuality secret throughout his career in an industry which is notoriously macho. Only a few close friends knew about his four-year relationship with Chevalier, a young Canadian he met on a gay escort agency website. When the relationship broke down and Browne refused to keep financially supporting him, Chevalier sold his story to a Sunday newspaper in early 2007. Browne attempted to get an injunction to prevent publication and lied to BP’s lawyers, and later in court, when he told them he had met Chevalier while jogging in Battersea Park. He wrote: “I was ashamed and embarrassed, and had yet to confront the secret I had hidden in a dark corner all my life … I just could not bring myself to tell the truth.”
Browne is now a managing director of Riverstone Holdings, a private equity firm which invests in energy companies.
