There are many things that can be held as testimony of the desperation of this Labour government – the repeated returns of Peter Mandelson, for one – but the biggest one to me is the appointment of celebrity businessman Alan Sugar as their chief business advisor, the so called “Enterprise Tsar”.
The decision now of Siralan – surely the first man in history to have his title and name merge portmanteau like into something that sounds like an alien species from Doctor Who – to sue Quentin Letts personally for calling him “a dipstick…wally” and “not having an enormous intellect” has been rightly condemned. Journalists and Editors must not be afraid to criticise and make fun, and those in the public eye must be grown up about these things.
Sugar certainly dishes out some particularly personal spite in the most bullying of ways, so it’s a bit much for him to now claim to be some kind of delicate flower.
For the Conservatives however there may be much to gain. Much has been said of how Sugar didn’t seem to understand what being a peer entailed etc, but there’s more than that. Sugar has nailed his colours to a very welcoming Labour Party, but those colours aren’t as pro-enterprise and conducive to business as they think. If the press begin examining the allegations of Letts and the claims of Sugar then this could soon become very damaging.
Now Alan Sugar has been hugely successful, no one is knocking him that way, but so have lots of people. He is in no way qualified to claim the title of the nation’s top business guru as he largely has. Quite the contrary in fact, which no doubt partly explains why Quentin Letts decided to label him as he did.
This is a man after all who ran a company worth over a billion pounds in the late-80s, a market leader, a British Sony, and proceeded to all but destroy it through his sheer hostility to innovation, creativity and the people that provide these skills. The young IT wizards didn’t aspire to work for him in his ghastly Brentford HQ, his products were cheap and quality arose as an issue, the corporate buyers of High Street chains had no loyalty to his abrasive personality, and consequently when was the last time you bought an AMSTRAD?
In the 1980s AMSTRAD was valued at £1.2bln. In 200? It was sold to Sky, it’s last customer, for one-tenth of that. Glad I wasn’t a shareholder.
He was a disaster at Tottenham Hotspur, an experience he himself described as a “waste of my life.” He launched the “em@iler”. In 2005 he dismissed the iPod as bound to be “dead, finished, gone, kaput” within a year.
Jeremy Lee at Brand Republic branded him “disastrous with money, inept at management, a poor judge, sexist and a bully”. I’m surprised he isn’t being sued as well. The Mail has a catalogue of errors that anyone who sees Sugar as a business role model should read.
There is also his claim on television that “You don’t know you’re in a recession until you’re coming out of it.” Interesting, though I don’t quite follow and neither does anyone else.
So “enormous intellect?”
Perhaps it’s better to drop the court case, Alan?
