Like an impressionist painter, Bower has produced a work which will be popular and which gets the broad brush strokes right. But he does not always have Yergin’s touch or his strategic grasp. One has the impression that he doesn’t really like businessmen. Whatever Browne’s flaws, he deserves some credit for his sense of vision, his political dexterity and for his transformation of a mid- ranker — which nearly went bust in 1992 — into Britain’s greatest industrial enterprise.
It was quite something for a cultured 5’ 4” bachelor, brought up on a refinery in Iran, whose parents both worked at BP, who was put through King’s School, Ely, and Cambridge University by the company, and who lived with his mother until she died, to dominate a redneck business like the oil industry. It is not entirely surprising that Browne did not want to leave an organisation he had known, man and boy. We find writ large in his story something which Bower occasionally misses: even oilmen are human, after all.
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