Deadlier than the Mail

The publishers of the Daily Mail -- the only mainstream UK paper that was pro-Hitler in the 1930s -- have re-established their credentials as the country's most despicable media barons by "outing" BP Chairman Lord Browne as a homosexual. There is no conceivable "public interest" angle to this -- or at least there wasn't until the threat from the Mail panicked Browne into perjuring himself. The Mail must be thrilled -- the man has lost both his personal privacy and his reputation as a businessman of integrity. The paper has spent most of this week dancing on his grave, bragging that his career is in tatters. It is not an edifying sight.

One aspect of the coverage of this story elsewhere in the media has puzzled me: the widespread suggestion that Lord Browne kept his sexual orientation hidden because of persistent homophobia in the "City". Yet it seems his homosexuality was well-known throughout the oil industry. It didn't seem to stop him reaching the most senior position in one of the sector's biggest companies, so to suggest that the "macho" nature of oilmen forced him into the closet seems a bit odd. It's much more likely that he really didn't think it was anyone else's business.

I never worked in the oil industry but I did spend many years in the "City" (which is, by the way, not the same thing). When I moved to my Bank's London trading room, I worked with a significant number of openly gay colleagues. They were, as my mother would say, not backward in coming forward, maintaining a little trophy wall of gay icons, featuring (if memory serves) a Robbie Williams calendar. One can only imagine how the firm would have reacted if one of the straight male employees had pinned up an FHM calendar. But we were all too busy making money to take any of this seriously. There may well be workplaces in Britain where homosexuals are not accepted, but there are a lot fewer now than there were a decade or two ago, and I would be very surprised if there were very many of them in the "City".