Brand and Looney fell foul of big shifts in sexual attitudes

The only time I saw Russell Brand perform was some twenty years ago. He was brilliant. I had not heard of him but more knowledgeable media insiders hired him to add spice to the Edinburgh Television Festival. That national treasure, Sir David Attenborough, was in the audience and laughed so hard I was worried he might be taken ill.

I first became aware of Bernard Looney about the same time through friends at BP. Looney was one of the so-called “Turtle” aides trained up by the legendary BP CEO John Browne. Most of them have gone on to top corporate careers.

Both Brand and Looney were tipped for greater things and so it has proved. Both were single men, renowned for their attractiveness to the opposite sex.

In just the past few days, personal conduct in their private lives has led to the downfall of both. Indirectly and professionally for Looney who resigned abruptly as BP chief executive over the non-disclosure of past relationships with colleagues. Directly, reputationally and potentially legally for Brand after a joint media investigation by Channel 4 and The Sunday Times, headlined: “Accused: Russell Brand, the ‘sex predator’ who hid in plain sight”.

The two cases are hugely different. There is absolutely no suggestion of abusive, coercive or non-consensual behaviour by Looney. Brand is up against specific allegations of abuse, which he denied on his YouTube channel even before they were published. 

Yet both men have fallen foul of the shift in attitudes. Society is redefining what it considers “acceptable” private behaviour in the power dynamics between bosses and their subordinates, and in sexual relationships in particular. 

This matters for many reasons. 

It is part of the overdue pursuit of equality between the sexes, which is as yet manifestly unachieved in many contexts and countries. 

The ambitious should take note that they are required to be more circumspect in their personal relationships than in previous decades.

The material consequences of bad behaviour frequently spread far beyond the people intimately involved. Looney’s ousting initially wiped £2 billion off BP’s stock valuation. 

Finally, as David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun pointed out, to the embarrassment of the BBC’s Today Programme, the media sector is prominent in exposing misconduct elsewhere, but has often failed to police its own backyard. The serial sex criminal Jimmy Savile was still being celebrated when he died. Some now see parallels in the permissive adulation once lavished on his showbiz pal Brand. 

The reckoning underway in the US, the UK and Western Europe spread rapidly through the corporate and media worlds following the #MeToo allegations against the film producer Harvey Weinstein in 2017. 

Weinstein is now in prison serving lengthy consecutive sentences in New York and California, on rape convictions.  Yet it would be a mistake to see criminality as the decisive issue. Many jobs are being lost and reputations irreparably destroyed for conduct which is well within the bounds of current legality. 

The NGO Conference Board records that last year personal misconduct played a part in half of the 3,000 “forced departures” by CEOs from major US companies last year. It was a feature in just 14% in 2017.

There have been numerous high-profile departures on both sides of the Atlantic, related to relationships at work or alleged sexual behaviour mostly not involving allegations of criminality: including John Allan chair at Tesco, Tony Danker at the CBI, Jeff Zucker at CNN, Steve Easterbrook at McDonald’s, Crispin Odey at Odey Asset Management, Brian Krzanich at Intel, Jeff Schell at NBC, and Jeff Staley at Barclays.

One couple in five meet at work. This makes it difficult, not to mention socially undesirable, for employers to prohibit intimacy between colleagues. Some do ban it outright. Meta/Facebook allows staff to ask each other out once only, after that it is potential harassment and a matter for HR. 

The real problem – and perception of potential unfairness –  arises when one lover is in a position of authority over the career of another, a partner or former partner. Many large firms impose “love contracts”. These require those considered for promotion to disclose confidentially all previous intra-company relationships. There is a clear inference that any new ones would be unacceptable. 

In practice, this hands a loaded gun to the employer and rival employees, giving them an opportunity to get rid of someone, while not being seen to be morally judgemental of their conduct. BP explained that Looney fired himself because “he now accepts that he was not fully transparent in his previous disclosure”. The company also held up clean hands when its “Sun King” John Browne quit after making a false statement in a deposition which the board encouraged him to make to avoid publicity about a gay relationship unrelated to his work. 

Shrewdly, Brand has attached his openness “during that time of promiscuity” to his claim that “the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that.” He was employed as a freelance talent but he has not argued as yet that he was not in a position of authority or power over some of his conquests. Staff working on his programmes have described feeling like “pimps” when asked to bring members of the audience to him. 

As with Savile, the BBC is also in the awkward position of being seen as an enabler given the account by “Alice” that a car on the BBC account was used to ferry her, then aged 16, from school to Brand’s home.

Brand’s mainstream agents and publishers have said they are dropping him. The BBC and Channel 4 are now both investigating their involvement with Brand. There is ample recorded evidence that they lionized him at the peak of his mainstream career and broadcast his leering sexual boasting. Times have changed and they will be rueing it now. 

TV companies take editorial responsibility, by law and inclination. YouTube, the online platform where Brand now makes his living, does not, as David Yelland also pointed out.  Since what he calls the “co-ordinated attack” Brand has been supported by other dubious big fish in the alt-media waters including Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk and Beverly Turner of GB News. All of them join Brand in impugning the integrity of the mainstream media and alleging conspiracies.

Whatever happens to Brand, he has inflamed a horrid culture war. Looney and the other corporate departees are paying more conventional prices. All of them have been caught out by the new rules of the career game. Ironically they could have avoided trouble if they had stuck by one of the eternal verities. The advice given by his father to a friend of mine heading off to his first job was “Don’t s*** on your own doorstep!” Brand could probably get a whole set out of that. 

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