Lord Browne on taking risks and finding love

Details not just of Browne’s secret love affair with former rent boy Jeff Chevalier but also of how Browne had lied in court under oath made front-page news everywhere.

At the time, the CEO of BP was 59 and had been in the closet for his entire life. After breaking up with Chevalier, he discovered that his ex-boyfriend’s kiss-and-tell version of their four years together was about to be published. He panicked, tried to get an injunction and then made the fatal mistake of sticking with the official line that he and Chevalier had originally met jogging in Battersea Park, when in fact they had met on a gay escort website.

On the day the news story broke, Browne resigned. He had worked at BP for more than 40 years. “Driving away from the corporation that I helped to build felt like dying,” he later said.

Its most successful employee ever, he had begun as an intern in 1966, becoming chief executive in 1995 and transforming the middle-sized company into a global giant. Along the way he had earned a fortune, a knighthood in 1998, a peerage in 2001 and the nickname of “the Sun King”. The months leading up to his resignation were by contrast “the most nightmarish of my life”.

How times change. Today, Browne is full of enthusiasm for his prestigious new role. “The Courtauld combines the generic subject of art and the ability to influence culture and society with the fact that its university has generated some of the greatest leaders in the art world,” he says, referring to outgoing Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota. “I’m pleased to be leaving at the same time as Nick. We’ve done extraordinary things together, had some tough debates and great agreements, but it’s time for someone else to be with Maria [Balshaw] for the future.”

It’s too early to talk about changes at the Courtauld, although “sorting out the number of stairs” is a priority, he jokes. A more sexed-up events programme? Perhaps. “The permanent collections are lovely but what drives people to come [to galleries] is an event. Of course there has to be a balance between getting people through the door and pushing the frontiers of knowledge but everybody is competing for a share of mind, whether it’s the Science Museum, the V&A, the British Museum or the Tate. They all need to keep providing something different and new.”

This pressure, thinks Browne, is likely to be exacerbated by Brexit, to which he was passionately opposed but is now optimistic. “I was shocked and surprised by the result, which made me feel very out of touch,” he says, “because I’d met too many people in London.”

His enthusiasm also extends to the new French President Emmanuel Macron, who he’s never met — he admires his economics nous and “loves the idea of anyone under 40 being president”. And he’s surprisingly sanguine about Donald Trump. “It’s a very unstable, reactive way of doing things but maybe it won’t make a huge difference in the long term, though many of my American friends don’t agree.”

Browne clearly prides himself on his ability to keep learning and changing. As an art connoisseur, for example, he is entirely self-taught. He bought his first piece of art — a David Hockney lithograph — when he was 21 from his first earnings. “We didn’t have a lot of art at home because we didn’t have a lot of money but my parents kept pushing me to appreciate it from an early age, which was easy because I enjoyed it.”

Browne then casually mentions how he financed his physics degree at Cambridge by winning a scholarship worth £500 a year, for writing a dissertation illustrated with his own photographs about the Safavid architecture of Isfahan when his father, who also worked for BP, was posted abroad.

Nowadays he only buys art that has a connection to Venice, where he has an apartment on the Grand Canal. He spends at least one weekend a month there with his partner of 10 years, Nghi Nguyen, whom he met four weeks after the BP debacle.

“Of the thousands of letters I received after I resigned, only one was delivered to my home address, from a 32-year-old Vietnamese man called Nghi. He had read about the case and was curious. He had worked out which house [in Cheyne Walk] I lived at because there was a photograph in the paper even though they’d blotted out the number. It was typically Nghi. If you take a risk and it doesn’t work, so what?”

Browne breaks off and smiles. “So we met for a drink and got on very well, then met for a meal, then for many other things and the rest, literally, is history.” Browne’s face lights up as he speaks. Soon after, Nguyen gave up his job at Goldman Sachs and set up Velo, a Vietnamese restaurant, which has two branches now in central London that he continues to run successfully.

With hindsight, Browne wishes he had come out sooner, but, as he explained in his 2014 book, The Glass Closet: Why Coming Out is Good for Business, he is from a generation for whom being gay remains unacceptable. His mother, a Hungarian Jew and an Auschwitz survivor, had also instilled in him a need for secrecy. “She knew I was gay but her line was ‘don’t tell anyone, because being an identifiable member of a minority is something that will be used against you’.”

Since the book’s publication, several former oil industry colleagues have piped up to say everyone knew all along that Browne was gay but never dared mention it. Browne laughs about this, as he does about many things, apparently much more often than when he was in the closet, he says.

As well as being personally cathartic, writing the book helped him understand the extent to which LBGT people are still stigmatised in the business world. “In the top 500 companies in the world you might think five per cent would be gay so that would be 25 CEOs. But there’s only one, Tim Cook at Apple, so they’re still in the closet or, tragically, they’ve decided to opt out of the top jobs and stay at a level where they are not visible.”

An unlikely but convincing champion for LGBT rights, he wants to see change starting in schools and was thrilled when Justine Greening gave a talk recently on behalf of Just Like Us (a support charity), citing his book as having helped her come out. “In finance and business, two-thirds of people who are openly gay at university go back into the closet when they go to work. It’s still very conservative and slow to change.”

An advocate for gay marriage “for its symbolism of equality rather than anything contractual”, he creases up when I ask if he has any plans to marry Nguyen. “Yes, everyone asks me — and we’re thinking about it. We really are. But you’d have to ask Nghi.” Another interview mentioned that Nguyen thought marriage was too conventional. “That’s correct, but he’s getting older and may be changing. We’re not going to have this debate in a newspaper but I think… look, we’re both thinking about it. It’s important, and after 10 years we understand each other pretty well.”