I am very struck by the spin being put on the disgrace and resignation of Lord Browne, who was the chief executive of BP – and one of the most successful and powerful people in Britain —until he resigned yesterday after a devastating judgment that he had lied to the court about his erstwhile gay lover, Jeff Chevalier. Listening to BBC radio this morning was to receive the impression that Browne had tragically been felled by a revelation about his private life. This was the tack taken by Browne himself, who said in a statement that he had always regarded his sexuality as ‘a personal matter, to be kept private’.

But this wasn’t the point at all. The revelation of his gay lover wouldn’t have cost him his job. What did for him instead was that he had lied to the court in an attempt to prevent publication of claims by Chevalier that he had misused BP funds, facilities and staff to set up and help him run his mobile phone business. In his attempt to prevent these claims from becoming public, Browne had falsely accused Chevalier of having drink and drug problems which, he said, made his evidence unreliable. This was untrue. He also claimed that he had first met Chevalier by chance as he was exercising in a park, a claim in which the judge said he had ‘deliberately and casually’ lied. As a result, the judge not surprisingly threw the book at him, saying he had not only lied to the court for about two weeks but had also casually trashed Chevalier’s reputation.

Now there are calls for Browne to be prosecuted for perjury. Yet this is how Matthew Parris in the Times views such behaviour:

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… 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.

What extraordinary insouciance towards dishonesty in court. And what a spectacular misrepresentation of the cause of Lord Browne’s downfall. That noise you can hear is the rumbling of an agenda that drives all before it. It is not a pretty sound.