Lord Browne has nowhere to hide from this story

When it comes to a business story, as Peter Wright, editor of The Mail on Sunday, assured us it was, it is natural to turn to the Pink 'Un. It is far from usual to find the word "lover" in a Financial Times front-page headline. But the story that led to the resignation of the BP chief executive Lord Browne was hardly run of the mill. In purely business terms, it was sensational: the end of the career of the coun-try's most acclaimed industrialist, whose leadership of BP was one of the great corporate successes of recent decades.

The court judgment that lay behind the publication of the story is relatively straightforward. If someone argues for an injunction, is granted it, and later admits that information provided when seeking it was false (in this case how Lord Browne met Jeff Chevalier, his lover for four years), then it casts doubt on the credibility of other information given in support of the request for that injunction. It was rightly lifted, allowing publication of much of the story the MoS had wanted to publish months ago.

The Daily Mail repeated Mr Wright's line in its leader on the day the Lord Browne scandal or tragedy (that being the range of reactions) appeared: " The Mail on Sunday was originally planning to run a business story, not a personal one, about BP." The five pages on the case in the same edition of the Mail, and the stories in all the other nationals, were not light on the personal.

This was a gay relationship started through the internet and continued on an exotic and global scale in the rarefied world of the rich, famous and powerful. The business story was about allegations that Lord Browne had abused his BP position by using company resources for the benefit of Mr Chevalier. An internal inquiry at BP concluded that these were "unfounded or in-substantive". Matthew Parris, in his column for The Times, described the public interest aspect of the story as "slim to the point of desperation".

Lord Browne maintains he has always sought to keep his private and business lives separate, that he regarded his sexuality as a personal matter. My view is that he is entitled to the latter, but the former overrides it when, as so often, public and private lives cannot be neatly separated.

The business allegations concerning Lord Browne arose from his private life. Mr Chevalier went to the MoS and made them. He was paid "expenses and fees" for his trouble. Clearly, his naming as the source of the story would have revealed details of Lord Browne's private life. But BP is a huge public company with thousands of shareholders, including many pension funds. Any allegations against the chief executive are therefore a matter of public interest.

The hypothetical question is whether the injunction would have been lifted if Lord Browne had not lied. Possibly not, in which case this would have been the invoking of privacy law by stealth, and publication of a matter of clear public interest would have been prevented.

So while the heart says Lord Browne is entitled to a private life, the head knows that chief executives, like senior politicians, are accountable to their public, and one role of newspapers is to investigate allegations against them.

In the view of the FT: "The British tabloid media has a peculiar and prurient interest in the private lives of others that baffles those who do not share that obsession. There is a need to find some way of bringing to an end 'kiss-and-tell stories'."

Nobody will believe the MoS had no interest in the prurient aspects of the Lord Browne story. Many of us have to summon reserves of conviction defending a more straightforward kiss-and-tell when the tabloid's claimed occupation of the high ground is unconvincing. The worry is always about the powerful whom privacy law would protect. That is why we have to fight it, in spite of our distaste for much that is published as a consequence.

Peter Cole is professor of journalism at the University of Sheffield

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