However, Lord Browne does not look like the cat that got the cream. If the truth were known — and this is a man who rarely reveals his inner thoughts — he could probably have done without that bundle of manna from heaven.

Lord Browne transformed BP in the 1990s era of cheap oil into a world-beater with derring-do and a string of opportunistic takeovers to its bow. Today, his job seems less that of a corporate raider than a dull banker, with the thankless task of keeping the energy group lean and fit when the waiter keeps serving extra portions.

He insists that the high oil price is merely an unusual coincidence not to be repeated. He has little time for those who worry where the next barrel is coming from or how much the Saudis have hidden under the desert sands.

“One will never know how much there is but I find it too convenient to bring the point up when the price of oil is high,” he says. “Nothing has actually changed. There is plenty of oil not to be worried about it for the reasons people are worried at the present.”

Oil prices soared, he says, because demand grew at the rate of world GDP — twice its normal rate. A surge in Chinese demand coincided with strong consumption around the globe. In a typical year, demand grows by little more than 1 million barrels a day. Last year demand rose by 2.7 million barrels a day. This caused temporary insecurity but that is now over, Browne says.

“There is still a lot of oil around and there is still surplus capacity in Opec which will build up over time,” he says. He insists that production is building outside the cartel, with 1 million extra barrels a day each year. The top 30 quoted oil companies increased their rate of investment by 15 per cent a year between 2000 and 2003, he says.

BP has added about a billion dollars to its annual expenditure, although half is due to inflation — steel prices have soared — and the falling value of the dollar. The company has been skimming the extra layer of cream from each barrel sold to buy back its shares. As oil soared to $50 and more, BP was running its budget on a $20 threshold, using the surplus it earned to buy back stock worth more than $5 billion in the first nine months of the year.

This is stuff the stock market loves — although private investors complain that they do not see the benefit. But it seems a dull game for what has been one of Britain’s more exciting companies and for a man dubbed the UK’s best businessman.

Spotting the opportunity of the century, Lord Browne led BP into takeovers of Amoco, Atlantic Richfield and Burmah Castrol, in the process turning Britain’s also-ran oil company into the fierce rival of Shell. In 2003 he propelled BP into Russia with the settlement of a feud with the Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman, creating the joint venture TNK-BP.

By streamlining flabby US oil companies, Lord Browne generated quick bucks. But the real benefit over the longer term was probably the purchase of lots of oil and gas. Amoco brought with it a monster gas reserve in Trinidad that is generating huge profits from shipping frozen fuel to the US. Atlantic Richfield’s dowry was Tangguh, an Indonesian gasfield that will soon be servicing power stations in China. And TNK delivers low-priced oil from old wells in western Siberia — not hugely profitable but a big boost to BP’s output and a snub to Shell, whose production is declining.

Shell failed to make similar acquisitions and has paid the price with dwindling reserves and output. But what next for BP? Lord Browne recites from his list of treasured projects: gas in Trinidad, oil off Angola, 1 million barrels a day of Azerbaijan crude flowing into the Mediterranean and gas piped from Alaska to the US-Canadian border. All projects born or inherited in the 1990s. Where are the assets that will renew BP in the next decade?

Deals are a problem because everyone is making too much money. “We see no opportunities that fit the strategy,” Lord Browne says. “They are actually unusual circumstances. Some event has to happen . . . Clearly the circumstances that led to the big wave of mergers was a period of low oil prices. That is what did it. The view then was that the oil price could collapse to $5.”

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