First, the things this sad and silly story is not about.

It is not about wrongdoing – or not on any scale deserving the fuss The Mail on Sunday hoped to create. The allegations about the use of company resources in the support of Lord Browne of Madingley’s former lover are just that – allegations, which are denied. Even were they true they would be small beer. There must be many respected CEOs who have sent a car on an errand for someone they loved, or asked a colleague to help out on something unconnected with the company. And what wife, husband or lover has never overheard their partner talking about business, or been told what he or she did at the office today?

The “public interest” aspect of these stories looks slim to the point of desperation: a fig-leaf to cover more prurient motives for relating a gossipy human story. Nothing in that story suggests anything less than a giant of a dealmaker, winner and business navigator, wholly focused on the interests of his shareholders (and Britain’s). There is not the slightest hint that the relationship got in the way of any of that.

Nor is the story about unkindness, exploitation or ingratitude – except on the part of the storyteller. John Browne emerges as a generous and supportive man. Lord Browne supported Jeff Chevalier out of his own pocket. He was entitled to. That Lord Browne tried to find a career and a proper job for his lover seems rather to his credit: an attempt to equalise the relationship so far as possible; a wish to remove his friend’s embarrassment at being “kept”.

Nor is it a story of infidelity. Lord Browne has not been cheating on anybody. One gets the impression that this was perhaps his first real partnership and that he was a little naive about it. Lesser men would have paid for rent boys or prostitutes.

And I am perfectly uninterested in how Browne met his lover. He is not the first and will hardly be the last to be overcome by momentary embarrassment when challenged to disclose how a relationship started, and (no doubt asking himself what business it was of other people anyway) answer untruthfully in haste, then repent of his dishonesty at leisure. It was silly – no more. “Perjury?” Fiddlesticks.

Whatever the press may claim, there is no scandal here, and suggestions that Lord Browne may have described a dinner with the Prime Minister or a discussion with Peter Mandelson strike me as pathetic attempts to attach a public interest tag to what is really just a juicy bit of tittle-tattle. I would defend to the death the media’s right to talk about the private lives of semi-public figures; what disgusts me is the pretence of high-mindedness. It is Lord Browne himself, whose immediate resignation yesterday afternoon was in the interests of his company alone and cost him a vast sum personally, who comes honourably out of this.

What this story is really about is the awkardness of gay sex in the business world and our general fascination with the lives of the rich and (in Lord Browne’s case) slightly famous.

How easy with hindsight to say he mishandled this. Indeed he has, and badly. A peevish dislike of media prying, an irritable allergy to personal questions, which leads to evasions and half-truths and that no man’s land between a wholly private and and an openly public life, is asking for trouble.

Yet I can see that there really is a lingering problem about homosexuality and business. When Lord Browne told his shaving mirror, that it was not in the interests of BP’s shareholders that his gay private lifestyle became public property, he was not imagining the problem. One can only imagine what Vladimir Putin thinks about gays – but this was a statesman whose confidence Browne (and BP) needed. The Arab and Muslim world has no problem with secret homosexuality, but every kind of problem with acknowleged and proclaimed homosexuality.

Friends of mine in business tell me that we in the world of the media and politics, where attitudes towards homosexuality have shifted fast, do not realise as we page onward from news and comment, and into the business section, that we are moving into a different world, some of whose cultural values would shock us. The City is another country.

It’s changing, my friends there say, but slowly. Men like John Browne have had the misfortune to rise to power and prominence during a time of transition. Their careers straddle two eras. When he was young man, just starting, there is no way he would have made it to the top as an openly gay junior executive. The choice was between celibacy and a discretion bordering on deception.

As the years rolled on and attitudes began to shift, it was too late for him to shift with them, disavowing impressions he had allowed to arise at the start. Now he was too exposed. It would be news. It would not be news his shareholders and colleagues would have liked. He became stuck with a version of himself that he would never have chosen if he had known how times would change. And he persuaded himself that it was in the interests of his company, too – and Britain, for BP pays a bit of all our wages – not to spoil the picture the world had of him.

There must be thousands of senior men, and a few women too, in Lord Browne’s position, but undiscovered. There are still some left in politics. Is it for you or me to point fingers and preach about honesty? I doubt it.

Of this, however, I am sure. For all the misery Lord Browne will be enduring over the next few weeks, there will come a morning before the year is out when he awakes with a sudden sense that a Damoclean sword that has hung over him for so long, has vanished. His torment this morning will not be entirely unmixed with relief.

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