BP ‘turtle’ Brendan Looney out of the company he loved after relationships with staff

He said: “I was in Houston for 60 days straight helping out. To see what happened was very, very difficult. We will never forget what happened. We always have to have an eye on the past, because that has shaped the company. It was, without doubt, the most challenging time of my career,” he says.

“What you find during times like that is the depth and resources of people in the company and their extraordinary commitment.”

He finally succeeded Bob Dudley as chief executive in February 2020.

He became known as a driven and hard working executive who spends many hours working out in the gym. He was a devoted company man who said in 2018 :”BP is a company that has given me everything I have in my life.”

He certainly enjoyed the trapping of a man paid millions of pounds a year and who once, unwisely, described the business as “a cash machine” when oil prices were high.

Last year it emerged that he had sold a three bedroom flat in Mayfair to the developer Nick Candy for £6.5 million in November 2021. Less than a year later Candy had flipped it for a profit of more than £2 million. At the time the developer said: ““The size of the apartment is perfect,” he says. “It was just a bit tired and run-down; it needed a new kitchen and new bathrooms — it needed to be ‘Candyfied’.”

In October 2017 Looney married the life coach and GQ columnist Jacqueline Hurst, who Masterchef’s Gregg Wallace credited with helping relieve his anxiety before he appeared on last year’s Strictly Come Dancing.

It was to prove a short lived union and the couple divorced without children in 2019 three months before he became BP chief executive.

She later described her relationship with Mr Looney - and how it ended - in painful detail in her self-published book How To Do You: the Life Changing Art of Mastering Your Thoughts and Taking Control of Your Life.

She wrote: ‘When my husband ended our marriage suddenly and without warning via a WhatsApp message, I was naturally devastated.

‘I learned later that he had only married me because he wanted to get to the next level of seniority in the company he worked for and he had to be seen to be married, in order to be given the promotion.

“Unbelievable, I know, but that was the case. Getting my mind - and thoughts -around what had happened took time.”

A friend of Looney defended him, telling the Sunday Times: “He was briefly married during a period in which he wasn’t promoted. So if he married her to get promoted, that didn’t seem to have worked.

After taking control of the CEO role in 2020 Looney has set a new agenda of reaching a net zero target by 2050 and has spoken of a ‘new purpose of reimagining energy for people and our planet’.

One industry source suggested to The Sunday Times he was ‘playing to the woke group’ and said there was ‘a degree of disenfranchisement, as you’d expect’ among BP’s ‘older generation’.

On his watch energy giants were at the centre of a public outcry over profiteering after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil and gas prices soaring. It sparked the cost-of-living crisis for households and record profits for the likes of BP. It reported annual earnings of £23 billion for 2022, the most it made since it began as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909.

The year before the profit record, Looney compared BP to an ATM, saying: “When the market is strong, when oil prices are strong and when gas prices are strong, this is literally a cash machine.”

But as earnings records fell and payouts to shareholders rose - hitting $14 billion for 2022 in dividends and share buybacks – Looney courted further controversy by watering down his company’s commitments on climate change.

Looney said then that BP’s carbon emissions from its oil and gas operations would fall by between 20% and 30% by 2030 measured from 2019 levels, when its previous target was a drop between 35% and 40%.

He also increased plans for oil and gas output over the next seven years, a move welcomed by investors and advocates for UK-run energy production but slammed by climate change activists.

He also spoke out on diversity and LBGT+ inclusion in the workplace, which irritated some of the old guard but reassured BP that it had the right man at the helm of a £90 billion company that is under scrutiny from all quarters.

The board had already investigated allegations about relationships Looney had with colleagues in May 2022 but found no breach of the company code.

Further allegations surfaced, and investigations continue.

BP said: “Mr. Looney has today informed the company that he now accepts that he was not fully transparent in his previous disclosures.”

He goes immediately, to palpable shock in the City, which knew that, whatever else, Looney loved BP and believed in his mission.