JOhn Browne is used to being against the grain of the oil industry. It’s been 25 years since the former BP chief executive gave the historic speech to his alma mater at Stanford University in which he became the first Big Oil executive to link hydrocarbon emissions to the climate change. He was denounced by many in his profession. “I was told that I had left the oil industry church; I didn’t realize there was one,” he said dryly.

Now Madingley’s Lord Browne is at odds with his former peers again, agreeing to Rishi Sunak’s bumper tax on North Sea oil and gas operators to help fund a £15billion household package. The handling of public debate by the current head of BP, Bernard Looney, has been so clumsy that the tax is called the “Looney levy”.

“It’s fair and proper: these deals belong to the nation, not to corporations,” Browne said. “I have had exceptional taxes imposed on me by many jurisdictions in many places.”

However, the interbank peer cautions: “Profits should be taxed, but costs should be thought through very carefully, as you should have the ability to amortize your capital over time, as well as your operating costs. And designing a system that allows you to do all of this properly has always been complex. When you add windfall tax on top, we just have to be careful how you do it.

He remembers an exceptional tax at the beginning of the 1980s which led to companies paying more than 100% in taxes. “The government took forever to organize it and didn’t trust anyone to tell them what the price of oil was, so they set the tax higher than it was. So there are issues like this: costs have to be considered. But I think it’s fair to help people with their bills.

His timely conversion to the cause of climate change was met with some skepticism. This included a failed rebranding of BP as “Beyond Petroleum” which some have called greenwashing. The man the financial press has dubbed the “Sun King” has amassed 41 years at BP, including 12 as chief executive until 2007. He earns millions of dollars in salary and bonuses every year. These days, he’s busy with his latest venture, green investor BeyondNetZero.

resume

Age 74
Family “Successfully develop a new partnership.”
Education The King’s School, Ely; MA in Physics from St John’s College, Cambridge; and a master’s degree in commerce from Stanford University, California.
Pay “Today, I’m pretty self-sufficient.”
Last holidays Venice, “my favorite place on earth” (where he has a second home).
Best advice ever given “My father once told me to ‘find a real job’. As a result, I joined BP as an intern, and the rest is history.
Biggest Career Mistake “Not coming out as gay sooner.”
Word he abuses “I like the word ‘beyond’. My first book was called Beyond Business, and the climate growth company I co-founded and now chair is called BeyondNetZero.
how he relaxes “Ballet, theatre, opera and art. And exciting people and interesting places.

OWe meet at Browne’s Chelsea townhouse just as Sunak delivers his mini-budget. His personal library is filled from floor to ceiling with tomes on all periods of art. At the top of the spiral staircase is a collection of portraits of Browne by renowned German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. There’s dappled Browne, reflected in a mirror, and Browne standing by a cutting board, a half-cut crusty loaf in front of him (“I can’t even cook,” he laughs). It is a light silhouette, in a pink shirt and blue blazer, with tortoiseshell glasses.

Featured is a framed photo of Browne’s late mother, holding a bright red handbag. It played an outsized role in his corporate career: Browne claimed it was to protect his mother, an Auschwitz survivor, that he hid his homosexuality for decades.

He was taken out of “deep in the closet” by the Mail on Sunday, who posted a kiss-and-tell from her Brazilian lover, Jeff Chevalier, a former escort. The episode led to his resignation from BP. Does he have any regrets? “Tons. I wish I could have gone out sooner. My mother’s advice [was] don’t make yourself a minority…never tell anyone a secret because they will use it against you. These are important things a Holocaust survivor says to his son,” he says. He was afraid of being an “outcast”.

Browne was found to have lied about how he met Knight, telling his lawyers they met while jogging in Battersea Park rather than online. “It was a stupid lie. Such a serious error in judgement. What would he say to Chevalier now? “I wish him a good day.

Still, Browne says his ignominious departure from BP has opened up new opportunities for him. “No one would have offered me a job at a public company, and I didn’t want to ask…there was definitely the silver lining in that cloud.”

Fifteen years of presidencies, government work and board positions followed. His cultural roles have taken in the Tate, the non-profit theatre, the Donmar Warehouse and now the Courtauld Institute of Art. The pride of his personal collection is a 16th century Titian. He became an author, and dives into a few thousand words in his latest book, inspired by a series of podcasts linked to the Cop26 climate conference.

His trading posts have included the board of Chinese tech company Huawei, which he quit when Britain followed America to hamper its operations (“technically what they were doing was fantastic”). Then there was the Cuadrilla fracker. The government has opened the door to the technology since the energy crisis, but Browne says: “We could have generated gas supplies, which would have helped a lot, but it may be too late.”

His primary position is now that of President of BeyondNetZero. He set up the company – which is led by Lance Uggla, who founded research firm IHS Markit – last year to invest in companies that help manage and measure emissions, decarbonize assets, improve energy efficiency and accelerate the circular economy. So far, his interests range from a solar specialist operating in sub-Saharan Africa to a planned vertical farm project for America.

But does that make him a renegade from the oil industry? He laughs as he remembers being nicknamed a “tree-hugger” for advocating for renewable energy.

Shell faced protests at its general meeting last week, with protesters saying it was not investing in renewable projects fast enough. How can oil and gas chiefs effectively balance old and new technologies? “People would be looking for greenwashing all the time: if you said ‘we’re spending a billion dollars’, they’d say ‘let’s spend two billion’. Finding the balance is an ongoing debate.

After a political outcry, BP pledged to divest the Russian assets it had taken over during the Browne era. Should he have taken BP to Russia? “In 2003, Putin made a state visit to the UK. We had a banquet with the Queen and Prince Philip. He was seen as a reformer who would open up Russia and be good for security. For a decade, Browne met frequently with Putin and resisted his demands to give Russians majority ownership of BP’s joint venture with TNK. “He was like a wall of glass plates, very difficult to read. With hardly any expression of like or dislike, as one would expect from a trained spy.

More recently, Browne worked with LetterOne, controlled by now sanctioned oligarch Mikhail Fridman. Perhaps the West should have seen Russia’s murderous advance coming? “It seems obvious in retrospect, but it’s like you’re going down the street and asking people, ‘Why didn’t you cash in your ISA three months ago? Surely that was obvious.’

Browne stays plugged into BP, having dinner with Looney irregularly (they take turns paying). He is keen not to become an overbearing figure of Sir Alex Ferguson, who lurks in the business. He says Looney has done a “really good job of outlining his strategy and he’s implementing it bit by bit.” Looney was one of Browne’s last “turtles” – eager sidekicks destined for the best jobs.

Tony Hayward, another turtle and Browne’s immediate successor, was responsible for the deadly Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Browne was at a hotel in Dallas, Texas that day: was a tragedy. I was watching TV…it really was an existential threat to BP. Five years earlier, Browne had witnessed the extraction of bodies after the Texas City refinery explosion. He was accused of fostering a culture that led to Deepwater Horizon. “Everyone at BP says that’s not true. It was nothing but pure speculation.

Browne is working hard on his renewable energy mission. He concludes: “We are on the brink of an industrial revolution if you believe, as I do, that everything we do should be geared towards reducing emissions to net zero. The reason is not so much the result on the planet, but the people. If we allow temperatures to drop, we are likely to experience a very large amount of migration and death from flooding and heat stress on crop yields. It is about saving at least a basic sustenance of all mankind.

There is no calm sunset over the stormy career of the Sun King.