“I’d lived two lives for so long”: John Browne. Photo: Jeremy Young/News Syndication/Headpress

John Browne was such a success in the cut-throat corporate world he rose to become a lord. But he was living a lie that was eventually exposed. Now openly gay, he talks to Jane Wheatley about the pressure that kept him in the “glass closet”.

One morning in 1999, in a private room at the British Museum, several people were to be observed clustering around a small silver goblet. They were the trustees of the Museum, assembled to judge whether the 2000-year-old cup, with its price tag of £1.8 million, should be acquired for the Museum’s collection. As they peered closely at the ornate silverwork – a scene depicting two male couples making love – and debated its virtues, one of the group remained locked in silent anguish. John Browne was head of the giant oil company BP, an admired business leader, clever, cultivated and a passionate, knowledgeable collector of art. He was also gay, a fact he had successfully kept hidden from friends, family and colleagues throughout his life. As he would explain many years later: “The cup was a truly enticing masterpiece … Yet I could not bring myself to speak in favour of the object because of its homosexual imagery. I thought that praising the work would be tantamount to coming out of the closet.”

It sounds like an extraordinary case of paranoia, yet when the young John Browne was growing up in the 1950s, homosexual acts were still illegal in the UK, the British Museum had turned down the chance to purchase the cup, and it had been denied entry to the United States because of its explicit imagery. Half a century on, attitudes had changed: the Warren Cup, as it is known, was finally recognised as a masterpiece and purchased by the British Museum, where it has been on display ever since.

Object of desire: Browne did not support the acquisition of the Warren Cup by the British Museum, because of its homosexual themes. Photo: Mike Peel

Those intervening 50 years had been a mixed bag for Browne: as the liberalising winds of change swept through the arts, politics and the law, he was making a rapid rise through the ranks of a conservative, macho industry. But no one was “out” in the company – even though a former CEO had once grumbled that BP was “full of tired old queens” and ought to be called “British Pansy” – and Browne was sure that acknowledging his sexuality would be death to his ambition.

He immersed himself in work, leapfrogging from one senior post to another, becoming CEO in 1995 and presiding over a golden age of expansion for the company. He was lauded and awarded, anointed the “Sun King” by the financial press, entertained by prime ministers and presidents – he was pally with Vladimir Putin – and in 2001 was made a life peer, entering the House of Lords as Baron Browne of Madingley.

As the years rolled by, the idea of coming out as gay had become increasingly remote: “I had a lot to lose and I’d lived two lives for so long, why not carry on?” But in the end, the choice was not his: in early 2007 he was outed in the British press by a vengeful ex-lover. In a panicky attempt to stop the story being published, Browne told a white lie in court, was reprimanded by the judge and threatened with prosecution for perjury. He resigned from BP on May 1, 2007.

I arrive a few minutes early for my appointment with Browne and sit for a while on a bench by the Thames, looking up his six-storey house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. As prime real estate goes in London’s property market, this is top banana. The roses and wisteria are out and tall plane trees screen the houses from traffic noise on the Embankment and the Albert Bridge in all its silly splendour of pink, cream and gold.

It is lovely to be out in the sunshine after spending the day holed up in the office of Browne’s publishers, reading his new book under conditions of strict secrecy. I’m not sure why they are being so precious about it: there are no racy revelations or boardroom confidences in its pages. Rather, Browne argues an eloquent case for openness and authenticity, for people of all sexualities to be able, as he puts it, “to bring their true selves to work”. The Glass Closetcritiques corporate culture and the box-ticking nature of diversity policies, describes the lonely strictures of Browne’s own double life, and includes the testimonies of others who agreed to speak to him about their fear of disclosure. It is lucid, at times very moving, and impressively researched – he hired a statistician to sift through the data and the footnotes take up 33 pages.

I cross the road to Browne’s house, where a uniformed maid opens the door, leading me through the main building and across the beautifully planted garden to a former mews house, now a library housing the owner’s collection of porcelain, glass and rare books. A curving staircase leads to a light-filled upper room where I am greeted by an impeccably suited Lord Browne. There are deep sofas around a big glass table and a plate of tiny chocolate biscuits; I am given water in a goblet made of ultramarine glass.

Browne, 66, has been out for seven years and is now comfortably settled with a partner. Did he, in all the years at BP, dream of the day he would be free to live the life he now enjoys? “I think I got to the point where I wasn’t even considering that,” he says. “My definition of happiness became professional achievement – I worked more than I lived.”

It must have been lonely, I venture. “Very lonely: if there were other people in the company the same as you it would have been easier, but you don’t know who they are and you don’t ask.” At one point in his career he had a boss, “Frank Rickwood, a very great Australian”, whom he discovered years later was gay: “I had no idea.”

And lest we think Browne and his colleagues were living in a dinosaur era, now thankfully past, consider George, a young investment banker interviewed by Browne in 2013. George’s employer, the London branch of a major US bank, has in George’s words “gone hell for leather to create massive diversity programs”, to the extent that straight employees are encouraged to place stickers on their office doors to indicate a safe space for their gay colleagues. “Yet among the 300 people who work on George’s floor,” writes Browne, “no one is openly gay. He and his closeted workmates believe that coming out opens them up to professional risk. Stickers cannot change that.”

As George explains: “While you think there is a 99 per cent chance coming out will be fine, the consequences of that one per cent are terrifying. If someone doesn’t like me, he doesn’t need to be in my face about it or rude or homophobic. He can be very smart and just say in my [performance] review that I didn’t handle clients well. He can just make up a story and all of a sudden my ranking is in jeopardy.”

Brian McNaught, an American who conducts diversity training for corporate giants such as Goldman Sachs, told Browne that closeted employees, like George, tend to think that a catastrophe will accompany their coming out, regardless of protections in place at their company: “[They] have created dramas in their heads of what might happen but rarely, if ever, does,” says McNaught. What does Browne think would have happened if he had come out at, say, 30? “Would I have made it to the top of BP?” he ponders. “I don’t know.” But what does he think? “I think probably not.”

He observes that not a single CEO among Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s 500 top companies is out, and in the FTSE 100 (the hundred largest companies on the London Stock Exchange), there is only one. “Boardrooms are very conservative, that’s why they have a tough time getting women on board, let alone LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] people. Yet without role models in senior positions, nothing much happens.” Fostering openness is not just good for LGBT employees themselves, he says, it is good for the company: a closeted person frets about preserving his cover, which is stressful and exhausting; an employee who is out is more relaxed and therefore more productive. “A person in a better frame of mind does better business.”

Browne may have been no slouch at business, but the need to keep his two lives separate took its toll. He says he trained himself to dissemble: “Hardly anyone knew I was out in private; I just didn’t talk and had a reputation for being very reserved. Observant people, and there are many at BP, would have seen me for what I was: a gay man too fearful to come out, a man who poured himself into work to escape personal frustration and loneliness.”

After his father died, Browne brought his mother to live with him. Fashionable, elegant and an accomplished hostess, Paula Browne was an asset to her son and they lived comfortably enough together until her death 14 years later. Reading between the lines, I wonder which was more horrifying to Browne: the idea of coming out to his mother or coming out to his colleagues at work. “I did try to come out to her,” he says. “Her response was exactly what I expected: ‘Don’t be silly; when you’re different you’re in danger.’ “

Paula had been sent to Auschwitz as a child and, though she survived, the rest of her Hungarian Jewish family perished in the camps. “She was very much scarred by that. It made her wary.” How did he try to tell her he was gay? “I skirted around the subject,” he says. But she didn’t want to hear? “Correct. She wasn’t a stupid woman – of course she understood that homosexuals existed – but she didn’t want her son to be one. Her view was that minorities are often persecuted, and constant vigilance is needed.”

During their years together, Browne curtailed his gay private life, restricting himself to rare one-night stands. After he was made CEO it became more difficult, anyway, as he was often surrounded by security staff. But after Paula’s death in 2000, Browne began dating online and met Jeff Chevalier, a Canadian in his mid-20s working in London. They lived discreetly together for two and a half years, during which Chevalier learnt to enjoy the trappings of wealth – houses in London and Venice, trips abroad and expensive clothes. After the couple split up, Browne gave his lover a financial allowance – “to ease his transition” – stopping the payments after nine months. Subsequent appeals by Chevalier for further funds went unanswered and after making veiled threats, ignored by Browne, the spurned young man took his story, embellished with false accusations, to the Mail on Sunday.

In 2007, when the media storm broke over his head, did Browne have someone to look after him? He smiles: “Well, of course the day I left BP all the company apparatus disappeared. Photographers were camped outside my home, so I stayed there until I became yesterday’s news, which happened quite quickly: the dogs bark, the caravans move on.”

One day, not long afterwards, a letter arrived at his home from a man who had read coverage of the story and was sympathetic to his plight. How did this stranger know the address? “I actually think he went on foot to find the house.” Was Browne not suspicious? “Of course I was,” he replies. “I’d been burnt heavily already, but the letter was very thoughtful, very warm. I thought about it a lot, then decided it was so interesting, why didn’t I reply? So I emailed suggesting we meet for a drink.” The writer of the letter was Nghi Nguyen, a Vietnamese banker then working in London. He and Browne have now been partners for seven years.

I try to get Browne to tell me more of the story of his relationship with Nguyen, but I think maybe the lifelong habit of caution is not so easily discarded. Still, his new-found contentment is evident: “Nghi and I give quite a lot of parties, we love parties and it is very nice to be able to invite whoever we like, gay or straight.”

In the days following Browne’s much-publicised resignation from BP, the journalist Matthew Parris wrote in The Times: “For all the misery Lord Browne will be enduring over the next few weeks, there will come a morning before the year is out when he awakes with a sudden sense that a Damoclean sword that has hung over him for so long has vanished.

His torment this morning will not be entirely unmixed with relief.”

Looking back, does Browne see the betrayal by his former lover as a blessing in disguise? “Absolutely. I was dragged out and I realised after a little while that I could now be myself. It took some practice – it wasn’t like getting up and running.” If it hadn’t happened, and he’d continued to be employed at BP, would he have remained firmly in the closet? “Yes, and it might still have taken some time to come out after leaving. I’ve missed a lot of life, a tremendous amount. It’s made me so much happier to be myself.”

SMASHING THE GLASS CLOSET

Andrew Hall is head of corporate affairs at the Commonwealth Bank

“When I started as a journalist in 1995 on a regional newspaper, I’d probably have felt excluded from the very hetero, male, rough-and-tumble environment if I’d come out at work.

“I then worked for 10 years in politics, but the real workplace change came for me when I joined Woolworths as head of corporate affairs. In my first or second meeting with the CEO, he asked me how my partner Shane was going. He had made a deliberate decision to make sure I felt comfortable. It was the first time I’d felt really welcomed and accepted at work, and the fact that as a member of senior management my sexuality was in the open sent out a signal. It had a cascade effect.

“When I arrived at the Commonwealth Bank, there was already a champion group around LGBT people and I’ve been able to drive that to a much higher level. In our annual people-and-culture survey, the number of employees identifying as LGBT has jumped from 3.3 per cent last year to 8.7 per cent this year, which is fantastic. Our sponsorship of the Bingham Cup [a rugby union competition for gay players] has been a catalyst for change: we were able to use our leverage as a major advertiser to persuade the main sporting codes to sign up to an anti-homophobia policy, which they all did at the bank a few weeks ago.

“In the past 10 years, workplace attitudes have accelerated off the back of an already advanced debate about gender equality. It is more widely understood now that if you are going to be the best employers and get the best out of people, you must reflect the community and not inhibit people at work.”

Paul Zahra is chief executive officer at David Jones

“When I moved from Melbourne to Sydney 16 years ago to work for David Jones, I decided I’d no longer keep my sexuality a secret at work. Very few people were out in the company, but when gay employees saw a positive role model at senior level, there was an avalanche of declarations. My personal experience has been the driving force behind David Jones’ diversity policy: being different is something to celebrate.

“I believe being gay is a significant advantage in modern management; to be a man, but to understand women and have increased emotional intelligence. I have been criticised for being too sensitive, but I think of it as a strength. When I started as CEO four years ago, the first 10 minutes of every meeting would be spent discussing football scores, which cut out the women and gay men. People are more considerate now.

“Most gay people are full of insecurities, usually to do with early conditioning. I know young men who decide not to come out; although people like to think they don’t discriminate, they do.

“I’ve been with my partner for 24 years; when you’ve got a supportive partner it is easier to take on the world. I attend all company events with him, he sits with me at the front at fashion shows. He is a great example of a confident gay man and has been my mentor.”