The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘The end of my marriage wasn’t a huge loss – it was a gift, a lucky escape’
If Bernard Looney is looking for sympathy after his dramatic fall from grace, ex-wife Jacqueline Hurst’s latest Instagram posts suggest he certainly won’t be getting any from her, says Eleanor Steafel
The shock departure of BP CEO Bernard Looney has been the talk of the City this week. After more than two decades at the £90billion company and four years at the helm, he resigned with a carefully worded statement. Looney admitted he had not been “fully transparent” in his disclosures to BP concerning past personal relationships with colleagues. Initial investigations into allegations began in May last year; this week, he walked away from the company where he has worked since 1991 for good.
What did he do? His ex-wife, Jacqueline Hurst, might know. In fact, if Looney, 53, needs any words of wisdom during a challenging week, a good place to start might be Hurst’s Instagram page. He’ll find all manner of helpful affirmations there. Take “mistakes are stepping stones to wisdom”, for example – a handy mantra after having been exposed for making what sounds like rather more than one “mistake” at the company. Or this one: “Sometimes, you have to figure out who you aren’t to realise who you are. Sometimes, you have to know what a good relationship isn’t to understand what it is.” Or yesterday’s gem: “God’s plan is always worth the wait.”
Looney was only married to life coach Jacqueline Hurst for two years, but it was her name that appeared alongside his in every news report. Why? Because in her 2022 book, How To Do You: the Life Changing Art of Mastering Your Thoughts and Taking Control of Your Life, Hurst wrote in painful detail about the way, she alleges, Looney cast her aside at the end of their relationship.
“When my husband ended our marriage suddenly and without warning via a WhatsApp message, I was naturally devastated,” she wrote. “I learned later that he had only married me because he wanted to get to the next level of seniority in the company he worked for and he had to be seen to be married, in order to be given the promotion. Unbelievable I know, but that was the case.”
Looney was among an elite group of so-called super execs referred to as the Turtles (after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), driven young men mentored by Lord Browne, one of BP’s most influential chief executives, who had spent their working lives at the company and climbed their way up to the boardroom. He was made CEO in 2020, three months after he and Hurst divorced. A friend of Looney’s pointed out to The Sunday Times that technically he was only “briefly married during a period in which he wasn’t promoted… So if he married her to get promoted, that didn’t seem to have worked. Maybe he divorced her to get promoted.”
Hurst and Looney married in October 2017. They separated the following year; their divorce was finalised in 2019. Hurst’s Instagram posts from the lead up to the wedding (which was to be her second) reveal a woman excitedly gearing up for her big day. Looney appears to have “spoiled” his bride-to-be with endless bunches of flowers; a clip from the day itself shows Hurst at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair (near where Looney still lives), strutting towards the camera, wearing flowing white trousers and a white asymmetrical top. “I’m walking into my wedding night,” she wrote in the caption. “Can’t believe I’m getting married #bernardlooney you’re a lucky boy…”
Weeks later, the pair jetted off for a pre-Christmas honeymoon. “Just arrived in the Maldives,” Hurst wrote. “He and I are about to slow down and enjoy the moment for a few weeks – but don’t worry I’m not taking his name.”
Hurst was already a successful life coach before she met Looney. In a piece for the Daily Mail in 2015, she wrote about the teenage battles with anorexia and drugs which inspired her to become a coach. These days, she says on her website, her aim is to help clients “be, feel, perform and live better”. Hurst and Looney were arguably an unusual match. While Looney (who earned more than £10million last year) grew up on a small family dairy farm in County Kerry, Hurst grew up in a traditional Jewish family in a seven-bedroom house in Mill Hill, north London. Her parents were often away for weeks at a time while she was looked after by nannies and sent to private school. In her teens, Hurst became “addicted to amphetamine diet pills and then progressed to cocaine”. Her eating disorder and addiction plagued her teenage years. “One day, when I was about 20, I lay on my bed alone in my flat, terrified by how fast my heart was racing,” she wrote. “I’d taken 12 diet pills in one go – the recommended dose was two. As the amphetamine coursed through my body, I knew I’d gone too far. I lay there, frozen, just praying the feeling would pass.”
She got clean in her twenties and had become a life coach by 30. “I define my approach as ‘helping people step into emotional adulthood’,” she said, “so they can stop blaming others for how they feel.” She first made acquaintance with
Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace when he called her from the set of
Strictly Come Dancing in 2014. “He told me he was about to walk off the set due to anxiety unless I could help him. As we talked, he experienced a ‘breakthrough moment’ and actually enjoyed himself.”
Perhaps these therapeutic skills drew Looney towards her? She wrote an advice column for GQ between 2016 and 2021, telling readers “how to rediscover your fighting spirit” or “how to deal with failure”. When her marriage came to an end, she channelled it into a section of her book. “Getting my mind – and thoughts – around what had happened took time,” she wrote, in a chapter about anxiety.
“Gradually, I realised that he was, in fact, giving me an unexpected gift. Instead of viewing the end of my marriage as a huge loss, I was eventually able to feel relief that I’d had a lucky escape. Why would I want to be married to someone who treated me like that? It took time to reach this point but I knew I didn’t want to remain forever in a state of negativity or anxiety, beating myself up about what had happened.”
The book was self-published but has enjoyed some success. “My… book got turned down over 40 times!” Hurst wrote on Instagram to her 60,000 followers. “I got bored of people’s ‘no’s’ so I just did it myself. Once I wrote it, I got it self-published in LA, and it immediately hit the No.1 International Bestseller on Amazon!!! I’ve sold over 10,000 copies and it’s been downloaded on audiobook over 8,000 times. The moral – you can do whatever you put your mind to doing.”
These days her posts are peppered with platitudes like “this too shall pass” and “healing is for the brave”. It’s hard to find evidence of her ex-husband among them, though one reminding her followers that “your worth is not defined by the person you are married to” does raise an eyebrow.
This week, the morning after the news of Looney’s behaviour hit the headlines, Hurst was in America, posting pictures from the beach (she spends part of the year in Miami). She hasn’t yet addressed her ex-husband’s fall from grace directly, but she has left what could only be a thinly veiled message on her Instagram – a post with the words: “When the world offers something to me that isn’t mine to hold, I let it go.”
A BP spokesman has said, “We don’t comment on the personal life of any of our people, including the chief executive.”
‘I learnt later he had only married me in order to get a promotion at work’