When Lord Browne of Madingley chatted to Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs last year, he spoke of his mother with deep love and admiration. She was a Holocaust survivor who spent 18 months in the Auschwitz concentration camp, but emerged with a great appetite for life and an unshakeable faith in the opportunities of the future. She used to tell her son not to dwell on the past, but to look ahead. It can only be hoped that her advice lived with him still yesterday, on what must have been the darkest day of his professional life.

For if Lord Browne can take to heart the one difficult, but redeeming, lesson of his sad downfall from BP, he will go on to great things in business and public life. The lesson is this: Lord Browne’s mistake was not telling a pointless lie, but trying to keep an unnecessary secret.

This is not to trivialise the fact that the BP chief executive misled the court. In his attempt to have the story of his homosexual relationship with Jeff Chevalier suppressed, he told a lie — he denied that he had met Mr Chevalier on a gay website, but pretended intsead that he had, in effect, bumped into him while out jogging in Battersea Park. This was not only a crime, but a disgrace for a man who, as the judge pointed out, “prays in aid his reputation and distinction, and refers to the various honours he has received under the present Government”.

Worse still, Lord Browne and his lawyers sought to smear the name of Mr Chevalier in their efforts to discredit him. They said he was unstable, as a result of his reliance on alcohol and drugs. In fact, he has never had any such substance abuse problem.

But this was, surely, a forgivable lie. Lord Browne already faced what to him was the excruciating prospect of seeing his closeted homosexuality made public and, for whatever profound personal reasons, the embarrassment of gay internet dating crossed a threshold too far. This was not a question of his honour, but that altogether more common human frailty, his pride.

The deeper root of Lord Browne’s downfall, though, lies with his decision to guard his privacy so fiercely for so long. The secret at the heart of what was a very public life ultimately perverted the behaviour of Lord Browne and those around him in a way that was far more damaging to his reputation than the simple fact of looking for a gay lover on the web.

The justifications trotted out for Lord Browne’s insistence on protecting his private life are all respectable.

The chief executive of BP is not a politician who holds himself up as an example to society. He has no responsibilities, except the stewardship of his company in the best interests of his employees, his customers and, in financial terms, his shareholders. The families of the 15 people who were killed at the Texas City refinery because BP’s safety systems failed to prevent an explosion in 2005 may be understandably outraged that Lord Browne has chosen to resign as a result of a scandal in a tabloid newspaper, rather than to take responsibility for the deaths of workers on his watch, but the idea that a FTSE chief executive has to uphold the same standards in private as a publicly elected official is absurd.

Lord Browne has spent his career in an industry in which his counterparts — Arabs and Texans — are not generally known for their public sympathy for gay men. Likewise, Lord Browne did not want to be known as the world’s most successful gay businessman.

This was, after all, an open secret in many parts of government, the oil industry and the press. People respected his right to privacy. And there is no reason why Lord Browne or any man or woman in business should live by the odious standards set by this story. The public interest and press freedom were not at issue as much as The Mail on Sunday’s eagerness to “out” a successful man held in high regard by new Labour.

Let’s be clear: there were no substantial issues of business or public policy at stake here. Lord Browne has had meetings with senior members of the Government and discussed important issues facing BP; if he had not, he would be failing in his duty as the boss of Britain’s biggest company. The fact that he lent his boyfriend a computer was probably lax and, on reflection, misguided, but not significant.

Mr Chevalier’s subtle menacing of Lord Browne is hard to stomach, but it would not have been possible without Lord Browne’s secrecy and willing buyers in the press. This episode marks the further intrusion of tabloid prurience into the British boardroom and the country will be poorer for it. The US has villified chief executives for abuse of perks and power — viz Dennis Kozlowski’s famous shower curtain — but not intruded on sexual privacy for the sake of it.

All of that being said, the price of defending those principles and safeguarding Lord Browne’s privacy was ultimately too high.

In his efforts to support his clandestine lover, Lord Browne coopted colleagues from the company in ways that compromised both them and the office of the chief executive. Both he and David Allen, BP’s group chief of staff, served as directors on Mr Chevalier’s mobile ring-tone company, a little business invented to keep him in the country.

More disturbingly still, the secrecy at the heart of Lord Browne’s life added to the closed and defensive nature of the court of the Sun King — the nickname that initially reflected the glory heaped on Lord Browne and, over the years, hinted at the overweening, even dictatorial nature of his leadership. That Lord Browne was willing to lean on colleagues to help Mr Chevalier was just one small part of this dangerous cult of the chief executive.

The court documents reveal that Lord Browne did not want elements of his private life made public, because they would “reflect badly on BP and its brand”. The job of BP’s chief executive, in everything he does, is precisely the opposite. Being gay, of course, would not have put that reputation at risk. The secrecy, ultimately, did.

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