Is former CEO BP boss Bernard Looney married? Who is Jacqueline Hurst - what she said about her marriage in her book

Bernard Looney, the CEO of BP, the leading oil and gas company, has announced his resignation after failing to be “fully transparent” with the board over his “past relationships with colleagues”.

The company said that in May last year, the board had received and reviewed allegations relating to Looney’s conduct “in respect of personal relationships with company colleagues” and the “information came from an anonymous source”.

BP said that during that review, Looney “disclosed a small number of historical relationships with colleagues prior to becoming CEO” but no breach of the company’s code of conduct was found.

The oil giant added that “further allegations of a similar nature were received recently” and the company’s investigation into this is still “ongoing”.

Looney said he “accepts that he was not fully transparent in his previous disclosures” and “did not provide details of all relationships”, BP said.

The former BP CEO is not married - however he was married for two years between 2017 and 2019 to Jacqueline Hurst.

According to Hurst’s website, she is the UK’s leading Life Coach and number one best selling International Author of How To Do YOU: The Life Changing Art of Mastering Your Thoughts and Taking Control of Your Life. She is also a Master NLP Practitioner and a Certified Health and Weight Coach with over 16 years experience.

According to a report in the Daily Mail last year, the pair ended their marriage three months before Looney took up his post as BP CEO.

In Hurst’s book, published in 2021, she speaks about a marriage which The Sunday Times understands refers to Looney.

In a chapter on anxiety in the book, Hurst claims that her husband only married her to get ahead at BP and ended their marriage via a WhatsApp message.

She wrote: “When my husband ended our marriage suddenly and without warning via a WhatsApp message, I was naturally devastated. 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. Getting my mind — and thoughts — around what had happened took time.”

A friend of Looney defended him, telling the Sunday Times: “He was 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.”

While a BP spokesman told the paper: “We don’t comment on the personal life of any of our people, including the chief executive.”