Towards a technological utopia

The rebranding of John Browne has been a long and, to those of us living overseas, instructive affair. Readers will recall the unedifying circumstances leading to his dismissal from BP ten years ago, when the country’s usual gang of disagreeable and unkindly figures such as Paul Dacre and Tom Bower were snapping busily at his heels. Much has happened since.

In the classic style of the British establishment, his disgrace has been followed by a steady stalactitic drip of preferments and praise, committees and chairs and board memberships, much aided by quires of unctuous journalism, most tending to focus on the impeccable taste and artistic judgment (not to say financial savvy) with which he has furnished and stocked his digs in the fashionable quarters of London and Venice.

Now, after an inevitable confessional book about the benefits of ‘coming out’ in the boardroom (which Apple’s Tim Cook seems to have managed with rather less fanfare) and a pair of politely received business advice manuals, we have this very much more significant and satisfactory volume, which offers up an impressively repurposed John Browne. Here he is as public intellectual and national guidance counsellor, bent on directing the country out of its current post-imperial innovative quagmire and towards the sunlit uplands of a high-technology utopia, and presenting the very best of what he believes tomorrow’s world has to offer to us all.

Though Browne is a corporate man to his very soul — variously described by former BP courtiers as organised, impeccable, driven, remote, aloof, and fond of quoting Intel’s Andy Grove’s remark that ‘only the paranoid survive’ — he likes to say that he is, by intellectual preference, an engineer. He tells us that he became one in large part out of reverence for his adored mother — a Transylvanian Jew and survivor of Auschwitz — and her imperturbable optimism.