‘I am a New Labour person... I signed on to Tony Blair and what we have now is going back to the days of Arthur Scargill': Alan Sugar on politics and the BBC
Life is sweet when you're worth £1bn, have 6m viewers for The Apprentice and your first name is ‘Lord’. But Alan Sugar didn’t get where he is today by keeping his mouth shut. So it’s hard hats on Cowell (‘takes the mickey’), Corbyn (‘Labour’s doomed’) and Boris (‘surrounded by henchmen’) – and we’ll see you in the boardroom...
Of r Jeremy Corbyn's leadership: 'This Robin Hood approach – steal from the rich and pay for the poor – it is not going to work,' said Lord Sugar
You know those anxiety dreams when you find yourself doing an A level for which you’ve neglected to revise, or trapped in a job interview naked from the waist down?
Well, that’s pretty much how it feels waiting to see Lord Sugar.
He hates flattery and flannel, and the dressing-downs he issues to candidates on The Apprentice have now obliged the BBC to attach a psychiatrist to the show. Thus I am expecting a big beast, a grumpy, pinstriped Titan.
But the man sitting behind Lord Sugar’s desk is small and slim and not wearing a suit but jeans and a crisp blue shirt, open at the neck. Only the corrugated grey hair and scarcely there beard is familiar.
He bares his teeth at me. Oh God, I think, he’s already growling. But then I realise that no, this is Lord Sugar doing a winning smile.
He’s currently back on our screens, a third of the way through the 11th series of The Apprentice, with new judge and old ally Claude Littner replacing Nick Hewer, alongside Karren Brady.
Despite being a mere four episodes in it’s already a vintage year, with boardroom tensions spilling over into fisticuffs between two female candidates (a catfight!) and rumours of a romance behind the scenes. Ratings have soared back over the six million mark, which must delight Lord Sugar.
For this is the programme that has transformed him from just an ordinary billionaire – albeit one famed for his belligerence and occasional feuds, including an epic Twitter spat with Event’s own Piers Morgan, more of which later – into an acclaimed broadcaster and British business guru.
So, Lord Sugar, would you have entered The Apprentice yourself?
‘Back in the day, if I was 20, I reckon I would. Then of course I would have won it.’
‘We were doomed from the moment Ed Miliband was elected. The public did not like him – they did not like his demeanour, the way he spoke, the way he ate his bacon sandwiches,' said Lord Sugar
How?
‘I just would have done, unless Richard Branson or Philip Green was applying at the same time.’
And then?
‘Well I don’t know, it would have been a tight-run thing...’ I wasn’t expecting that, an alpha male admitting two rival alphas might have beaten him, but Lord Sugar is big on honesty, both in business and on television.
‘Honesty is my best attribute. Absolutely. What’s on my lungs is on my tongue – I am not going to flower my words, I tell it like it is.
'Anyone who knows me in the world of business will tell you that I might be a tough person to deal with, but when I say I will do something then I will do it. Shaking my hand is better than a 500-page contract.’
And he is as good as his word, which means that he’s happy to give Event his opinion on everything from Simon Cowell’s X Factor ‘gimmicks, which take the mickey out of the viewing public,’ to the Labour party that ennobled him, ‘doomed from the moment Ed Miliband was elected leader’, to the BBC’s declaration that this year’s Apprentice is the toughest series yet: ‘A classic example of poetic licence.’
He’s built a business empire and now an entertainment legend on this kind of forthrightness, but you have to wonder if it makes him hard to work with. He says not.
‘There are no Jennifer Lopez moments. I am not demanding – I do not play the diva and threaten to walk out. But television has a constant flow of new people with different ideas, and they need to be advised that I am only co-operating because there is an underlying business message.
'The BBC tends to forget that. When the programme is over, the real success of The Apprentice is demonstrating what can be done.’
What can be done is the creation of a clutch of companies founded by Apprentice winners and funded and mentored by Lord Sugar.
So today, for example, he has a half-share in a scientific recruitment company with 2012 winner Ricky Martin and a similar stake in a beauty salon with 2013 victor Leah Totton.
‘She’s been driving me mad asking me to have her treatments – I keep telling her I do not need them,’ he says with something that could pass for a Lord Sugar twinkle.
Then there are the earlier winners who went on to work in his own companies and those who have transcended The Apprentice to become media personalities: Saira Khan (2005 runner up) and columnist Katie Hopkins, a contestant in 2007.
There have been upsets, notably the constructive dismissal case brought against Lord Sugar by the 2010 winner Stella English, who claimed she was hired on a £100,000 salary only to become an overpaid lackey.
‘Her time in the limelight was beginning to fade...’ he furiously told the employment tribunal that found in his favour.
There has also been tragedy, with the death of 2010 candidate Stuart Baggs, described as ‘one of the standout characters of The Apprentice’ by Lord Sugar after he died of natural causes this July.
The Apprentice has a brilliant cast of judges and Lord Sugar makes no secret of the fact he is dependent on Claude Littner and Baroness Brady for his early intelligence on the candidates
Four years ago the peer almost walked out, but the BBC refreshed the show, enabling him to go into partnership with the winner instead of hiring them. Now he invests £250,000 of seed capital and steers their early years. Clearly he loves it.
‘This is taking me back to the early days, watching businesses grow from acorns,’ he says, while refusing to be drawn on when he might quit, or the identity of his chosen successor.
Both questions get a terse: ‘I don’t know’, though it’s clear he does it for love rather than money (Sugar donates his entire fee to charity).
‘Has The Apprentice improved my business, got me more business and made me more money?
'No. I guess I can get people to pick up the phone and give me an audience, but at the end of the day business is business and they are not going to put something my way because I am Lord Sugar on television,’ he says.
‘Lord Sugar on television’ is a phrase that falls lightly off his tongue. He sounds pleased by it and indeed he has hardly shrunk from the limelight.
He has amassed 4.5 million followers on Twitter, appears on the red carpet when The Apprentice is in line for an award, and has written an autobiography, a collection of his pet rants and rules for life – and now a memoir of his decade on the box.
But when you’re a boy brought up in the council flats of Hackney, east London, and have succeeded so completely you have a choice of homes, a Rolls-Royce, a yacht and private plane, plus a peerage, then I should think it’s satisfying to have that publicly acknowledged.
He had a meagre start in business, quitting his job to start buying and selling electrical goods at 19, only to have his father, a tailor, ask ‘but who will pay you on Friday?’
The then plain Alan Sugar founded electronic business Amstrad (Alan Michael Sugar Trading) in 1968, floating it in 1980 to make him one of the richest men in Britain.
Four years later he unveiled his Amstrad CPC 464, a home computer with a keyboard and a monitor that could be taken home, plugged in and fired up ready for use, all for £199.
It could be used for business, for education and for gaming, and it appealed to the millions for whom Amstrad was a trusted high-street name.
It earned Lord Sugar early comparisons with Apple guru Steve Jobs, although ultimately he would prove to be the true visionary. Lord Sugar’s corporate portfolio today includes aviation, property, advertising and IT.
He says he delegates a lot these days, but when I ask him what he read when he was laid up on his yacht for a week with a bad back over the summer he looks a bit puzzled before answering: ‘My emails’.
He’s been married to his wife Ann – they met in their teens – since 1968. They have three children, daughter Louise and sons Simon and Daniel, but as a father he was determined they should not be spoiled by his growing fortune.
Louise recalls having to make a case for her pocket money every Saturday, while Simon’s first job was in McDonald’s and the day Daniel joined the family firm he found his arrival had been preceded by a memo telling staff to speak up if he didn’t behave.
Lady Sugar, who knows her husband better than anyone, says he’ll probably never retire. It’s not because he has regrets or unfulfilled ambitions – apart from a ‘duff batch of computers in the late Eighties which didn’t work: quite a blow’ – he’s just not a quitter.
That makes his decision to leave the Labour benches in the House of Lords earlier this year a significant one for a man who was Gordon Brown’s Enterprise Champion.
‘We were doomed from the moment Ed Miliband was elected. The public did not like him – they did not like his demeanour, the way he spoke, the way he ate his bacon sandwiches.
'He was not a leader. Had his brother David been elected leader I think the Labour party would be in power today.’
'I guess I can get people to pick up the phone and give me an audience, but at the end of the day business is business and they are not going to put something my way because I am Lord Sugar on television,' he said
And what of the Corbyn leadership?
‘I am a New Labour person. I joined New Labour after being a Conservative supporter.
'I signed on to Tony Blair and what we have now is going back to the days of Arthur Scargill. It is anti-business, antiquated.
'Fifty years ago there was an argument for the working public to be protected from the so-called elite. These days you can’t say boo to anyone.
'This Robin Hood approach – steal from the rich and pay for the poor – it is not going to work.’
He’s dismissive of any suggestion of the re-nationalisation of industry.
‘No one has thought through the logistics of forcing Richard Branson to give back his railway. It is nonsense, a total nonsense.’
But he believes in Chancellor George Osborne’s ‘northern powerhouse’: ‘There are a lot of shrewd lads up north – it’s not just the south where the brains are.
'Look at Manchester, a huge commercial centre, the regeneration of Liverpool and Birmingham. You want opportunities? They exist all over the country.’
So might he ever return to the Labour benches to find a standout candidate for leader, Prime Minister even, since that’s what he does so well in The Apprentice?
‘No, they have to sort themselves out.’
So you’d never go back?
‘Never is a dangerous word. I am 68 years old now, an election in five years’ time brings me to about 73 and at that stage I might not give a s***.’
That would be a pity as he’s a proper political character, someone with experience and influence way beyond Westminster. He’s also man-of-the-people popular, a bit like Boris Johnson.
‘I reckon I could have been the Mayor of London, for sure.’ (Rumours have swirled for years that he would stand as an independent candidate or on the Labour ticket.)
‘I have been asked quite a few times and I can’t do it. I just could not afford the time, and more importantly I don’t really understand the politics of it all.
'I know that Boris has a load of henchmen and henchwomen around him and that they tell him what’s what, but it is too time-consuming for me.’
Oof: his putdowns aren’t just scripted for the telly, then. I toss him some other political hot potatoes. What’s his thinking on Scottish independence?
‘Keep making the whisky.’
Do we need a national conversation about flexible working for women and maternity packages?
‘It’s done, isn’t it?’
Non-doms: ‘There are some people who would kill their grandmother not to pay tax...’
Eventually I get a disappointingly polite, so mild you might miss it, rebuke for straying such a long way from the subject of The Apprentice and Lord Sugar’s ten years in television’s most famous boardroom. A whole decade: it makes him a bit nostalgic.
‘My wife always says the best series was the first one, but I think it’s a bit like having a baby – you always remember the first one.’
Maintaining that 24-carat quality has been because he ‘reins in’ the production panjandrums and their desire to make it more about entertainment than enterprise.
He’d be back in his Rolls and driving home to Chigwell if he thought the show was veering into the schmaltz and fake tension that characterises some reality TV.
‘The X Factor. There’s a classic example of breaking it. If it is not broke don’t fix it. They are constantly coming up with gimmicks which take the mickey out of the public, and that’s reflected in their viewing figures which are going down.
'I like to see the pathetic manner in which some of the judges try to create an air of jeopardy. They need a good lesson from me,’ he adds with a pantomime flourish.
The Apprentice has a brilliant cast of judges and Lord Sugar makes no secret of the fact he is dependent on Littner and Baroness Brady for his early intelligence on the candidates.
‘They are at the coal face. They say, “He’s a go-er but I haven’t seen much from her...” and then as the weeks go by their view changes and I have more dialogue with the candidates and I start to form my own opinions.’
He does not, he says, ever know at first sight who will be the ultimate winner, but gathers clues to their true nature as time passes.
I seize the chance to ask if I can have a nose around his office, which looks like it’s crammed with clues to his. Yes, he says, without skipping a beat, and leaves me alone there.
Behind his desk – huge, L-shaped, super-neat – there’s a table with his treasures on, a kind of office altar. There are a couple of dozen family photographs, not in lavish silver frames but ordinary high-street ones, a bottle of Christian de Montaille champagne (neither vintage nor posh), a copy of Gordon Brown’s book and his Bafta for The Apprentice.
Above them hang cartoons and sketches, a photo of him with Rupert Murdoch and one of his investiture, plus a cover of The Dandy.
A collage probably put together by his grandchildren is headlined Happy 60th Birthday Sir Papa Al.
On the desk itself are an assortment of colour-coded fine-liners (pink, blue, orange and red), a tablet with Sky News scrolling on silent and a mug bearing the slogan ‘Lord Sugar Whacks Piersy [Piers Morgan] every day on Twitter.
The pair – actually dear friends in real life, with Lord Sugar making a tribute speech at Piers’s 50th birthday party earlier this year – tear lumps out of each other online over everything from football teams to TV ratings.
Morgan has called Lord Sugar ‘a disingenuous old growler’ with ‘anger management issues’, while the peer has branded him ‘a pathetic groveller’ as well as ‘a DBT – a double-barrelled tosser’.
Then I spot, exactly where his right hand would be, something I’d expect to find on a clerk’s desk or an accountant’s, not a tycoon’s.
It’s a £20 Canon business printing calculator for Tax and Business sums with an old-fashioned till roll spooling out of the top.
So for all Lord Sugar may say: ‘Money, I don’t give a damn, frankly’, and for all his open-handed philanthropy, his family values, his celebrity and his politics, I don’t think that half a century after he set out to make his fortune there’s a tuppenny bit that escapes his billionaire’s gaze.
‘Unscripted: My Ten Years in Telly’ by Alan Sugar is out now, published by Macmillan, £20 hardback.
‘The Apprentice’, Wednesdays at 9pm on BBC1
