This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
I try not to get in a flap when Netflix creates a kids’ cartoon character called “Trans Barney”, the BBC puts Doctor Who into a dress and Disney kills off Snow White’s dwarfs. But what really frustrates me is how it’s impossible to find anywhere to watch those nice old romantic comedies like His Girl Friday and Beauty and the Boss. Yes, emotional involvement with your office superiors is well and truly cancelled.
By my reckoning, “inappropriate” workplace relationships are now the second most common reason for CEOs to lose their jobs. (Screwing the company is still number one — but not by much.)
The most recent scalp was Frenchman Laurent Freixe who was fired from his job as boss of Nestlé in September because he failed to disclose a romantic relationship with a direct subordinate. Other high-profile victims of their forbidden love include BP’s Bernard Looney and Steve Easterbrook of McDonald’s.
Andy Byron was forced to quit as CEO of software business Astronomer, after being caught on camera cuddling his head of HR at a Coldplay concert.
It’s not just men getting whacked. Nadine Ahn was last year “terminated” from her role as Chief Financial Officer at Royal Bank of Canada after it emerged she was in an undisclosed relationship with another employee who allegedly got promoted and bigger pay deals as a result.
It’s easy to snigger at these stories and mutter, “the fat cats had it coming.” But remember, none of these recent casualties were Harvey Weinsteins — there is no suggestion their relationships were anything but fully consensual.
There can be positive commercial benefits to business leaders romancing someone in their firm
Surely, now, it’s time to call a halt to the witch hunts and recognise that sometimes the right kind of office affair can in fact boost shareholder value.
So how did we get here? Well as Max Weber famously argued, puritanism has been embedded in business life since the very dawn of capitalism. There’s always been resentment towards colleagues who “sleep their way to the top” and the bosses who bend the rules.
But what’s transformed long-simmering resentment into the current explosive spate of CEO sackings is the covert introduction of Marxist gender theory and “intersectionality” into Western corporate life. In this worldview, every Christmas party clinch in the stationery cupboard is a moment of power imbalance and exploitation.
Anyone who consensually sleeps with the boss is a victim — and if they don’t see it that way, well, they must be suffering from “false consciousness”. Lapses of judgement which previously earned a “quiet word” from the Chairman now lead to Kafkaesque processes from which there is no recovery.
The chief executives of my acquaintance are, in fact, no more or less uxorious than the average person. Some go to great lengths to avoid temptations of the flesh. One CEO I know insisted on never being alone in his office or car with female colleagues.
I admired his uncompromisingly Mount Athos approach — though on reflection it was a little narcissistic.
Anyhow, the point is that if a boss’s marriage does happen to collapse, it is much better for everyone if they take solace in a co-worker than staying up late swiping through Hinge or hoping to catch someone’s eye in 5 Hertford Street.
Recently I watched a Chief Marketing Officer implode after he took up with a young artificial-enhanced Latvian he met online. It started with occasional missed morning meetings and ended with him going completely AWOL.
Had this executive found comfort with a co-worker, he might have kept his mind on the job — and we would have avoided the hassle of giving him the heave-ho.
And there can be positive commercial benefits to corporate leaders romancing someone in their org chart. Boards spend a small fortune on providing our executives with life coaches and “thought partners”, who enable them to privately vent frustrations and puzzle out problems. An office romance can provide a similar service at a considerably cheaper rate.
In Britain, America and other Protestant — or post-Protestant — nations, it is very hard to see an end to this prudishness. But maybe there is a way we can learn from our laissez-faire Gallic neighbours.
The French media rushed to the defence of Monsieur Freixe when their compatriot was fired by the Calvinist Swiss. Le Point magazine accused Nestlé of a “medieval mindset”, describing the requirement that office relationships be disclosed to the HR department as an act of “pettiness, rage and jealousy”.
Surely, it’s time to give our bosses back their private lives. And good luck to them if that means their Girl — or Boy — Fridays occasionally stay over for the whole weekend.
