Weirdness amongst the Brits

I haven’t had a lot of time to think about what all this means, but I was struck by two, to me, very peculiar things in today’s Telegraph (the most conservative of England’s daily papers).

The first story was that Lord Browne, the CEO for BP, resigned today because he’d lied about how he met his boyfriend.  He hadn’t lied about having a boyfriend, just about their “meet cute” story.   Actually, the real reason he quit was because, during the course of a lawsuit aimed at stopping publication of a story about him and his boyfriend, he lied about the meeting story.  That is, he perjured himself, a la Clinton:

Mr Justice Eady said the lie which to which Lord Browne admitted, after he had persisted in it for about two weeks, “was to the effect that he had originally met Mr Chevalier by chance, while exercising in Battersea Park”. Although this claim may be reported, the true circumstances in which the two men met are not included in the published judgments.

Mr Justice Eady suggested that the distinction between the two accounts of how the men met might be “of little materiality to the primary issues in the case”. But what mattered, the judge explained, was that Lord Browne “clearly thought it important at that time and quite deliberately, and casually, chose to lie to the court about it”.

Lord Browne said in his resignation statement: “My initial witness statements, however, contained an untruthful account about how I first met Jeff.

“This account, prompted by my embarrassment and shock at the revelations, is a matter of deep regret. It was retracted and corrected. I have apologised unreservedly, and do so again today.”

He added: “For the past 41 years of my career at BP I have kept my private life separate from my business life. I have always regarded my sexuality as a personal matter, to be kept private.

“I shall not be commenting on my personal issues further. I wish to pursue my personal life in private.”

The businessman had originally asked the High Court to prevent the publishers of the Mail on Sunday from reporting details of his relationship with Mr Chevalier, arguing that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

There’s more, but no matter how you slice it, it’s a strange little story.

The second story isn’t strange, but sad.  What was strange was the accompanying photograph (which has since been removed).  It seems that a 16 year old boy accidentally shot his 12 year old sister to death in their home.  That’s sad.  There’s a picture of a sweet faced little girl (now dead) currently accompanying the story.  What was strange was the original picture I saw, which was captioned something along the lines of “police at the scene of the shooting.”  It showed two individuals outside of the house in which the girl died.  They were not wearing police uniforms.  Instead, they were wearing full biohazard outfits, from shoe coverings to face masks.  Does anyone know if this is now the norm for British crime scenes?  And if so, is it to protect the cops or the crime scene from contaminants?

That picture reminded me of seeing the headline the other day that Britain is the most heavily saturated surveillance society in the Western world.  It’s not surprising, perhaps, that young British filmmakers seem to be drawn lately to futuristic apocalyptic movies in which British society is a crazed police state (such as 28 Days Later or Children of Men).  They’re probably picking up on the direction in which Britain is traveling.