When it comes to office romance, it’s who’s on top that counts

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a workplace affair, writes Rowan Pelling (who married her boss). But the roles have changed, as BP’s former chief executive has discovered to his (£32m) cost

Heike Makatsch and Alan Rickman strike up an office affair in Richard Curtis’s festive classic ‘Love Actually’ (Alamy)

In October 2017, every male boss in the Western world got a memo. It may not have landed in their inbox or PA’s filing tray, but they definitely received it – via blazing media headlines, countless Twitter posts, and even the TV dramas and plays commissioned in the following years.

The revelations that Harvey Weinstein was a serial sexual predator, and the subsequent MeToo movement, made it clear that powerful men hitting on colleagues in the workplace, especially junior ones who are inevitably more vulnerable, would no longer be tolerated. Yet, somehow, it seems BP’s chief executive Bernard Looney didn’t absorb the message, or maybe thought – in the way of lofty males since time immemorial – that it somehow didn’t apply to him.

The oil giant has just announced it has formally dismissed Looney after finding he had failed to disclose a series of personal relationships with colleagues to the BP board. More than that, they’ve hit him where it hurts (a sentence that too rarely ends “in the goolies”) by denying him £32m in pay and shares.

It’s a penalty that should act as a forceful deterrent to other office Casanovas. This dwarves the £400,000 paid by fired McDonald’s boss Steve Easterbrook, who was also let go after he was found to have had a consensual relationship with an employee, in breach of company policy. (He neither admitted nor denied the claims.)

The two cases also make an interesting departure from the sex scandals of old, when the office junior inevitably took the rap.

When I fell head over heels for the deputy editor of GQ magazine in 1993 – while working as the then-editor Michael VerMeulen’s lowly PA – it was made clear our over-bosses disapproved of the liaison. All the more so because my now-husband was 15 years older than me. But guess who got their marching orders? Yup, me – with a few months’ severance pay and no obvious job prospects.

This followed hot on the heels of VerMeulen himself being hauled before Condé Nast’s formidable human resources head because one of his previous junior employees had accused him of harassment. This young woman too had been dispatched with a small payoff. Although most people knew VerMeulen was usually running a number of simultaneous dalliances. That’s the way it was back then.

It’s also why I can begin to comprehend the reasons why proper Mr Bigs like Looney and Easterbrook thought they could get away with office trysts over the past decade – at a time when female outrage at abuses of power fully manifested, and millions of women worldwide gathered together and marched against Donald Trump’s sexism boast of being able to grab women “by the pussy”.

The thing is, these two men are fellow Generation Xers (we’re all in our early to mid-50s), formed by the social and cultural forces of the 1990s. And few phenomenons demonstrated the mores of the time more than the sudden proliferation of glossy magazines aimed at young men, filled with pieces about Wonderbra models and how to “pull” women. It was an era that saw the rise of male “pick-up artists” (PUAs), a concept brought to the masses by Rolling Stone journalist Neil Strauss in 2005.

In this context, you can see how men who were young in the 1990s might have swallowed some of the “Lad-Aid” without realising it – even those who might have thought of themselves as modern liberals. (Looney, for example, was raised on a small farm in Kerry, got a masters from ultra-liberal Stanford and was praised for saying he’d end BP’s relationship with Russian energy giant Rosneft.)

I am sure there are a number of women who are willing participants in office shenanigans with senior men, but that’s not the point. When powerful men have affairs with junior employees, it, rightly or wrongly, introduces the notion to the workplace that there might be some sort of career preferment happening via the bedroom, rather than merit. After the suffragettes, four waves of feminism and #MeToo, that’s a travesty.

Now “swinging-dick” antics come with a multi-million-pound cost. Let’s hope, like lads mags, they become as extinct as the dinosaurs.