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.