by Sugar, Alan
As we left London and I reflected on the great day, I tuned into Sky News on my car’s TV to see them mention that it was on this day, exactly forty years ago – 20 July 1969 – that Apollo 11 had landed on the moon. I could clearly remember standing in Rex Radio, an electrical retailer in Kilburn, watching the moon-landing on one of the black-and-white TVs in the shop. Back then, the thought of Alan Sugar landing in the House of Lords would have seemed equally miraculous.
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Prior to my formal introduction to the House of Lords, I’d visited the DBIS and was introduced by Shriti Vadera to the two members of staff who would be assisting me, Paul Hadley and Richard Callard. Paul, a rather tall fellow, was very formal and correct. He was a stickler for detail and worried about breaking any rules of protocol. He was always trying to pre-empt aggravation and examined the implications of anything I wanted to do or say – a real Mr Safety. Richard was a younger fellow, about my height, and as a qualified accountant at a large accountancy firm had been seconded to the department. He came across as being quite streetwise. Both of them were a great help in bedding me into Civil Service ways. Part of the deal agreed with the BBC was that I should not have my own office with my name on the door – pathetic, I know. However, I was allowed a desk and the use of a computer, and I was located on the same floor as Paul and Richard.
I started to get to grips with the areas in which I could be useful, mainly to do with the Business Link Centres the government ran. These are organisations where they have experts, gurus, mentors, call them what you will, that small businesses can approach to ask for advice. I didn’t want to form any opinions too quickly, but I did initially wonder why, if these mentors were so good at dishing out advice, they were working in some government department. Why weren’t they out working for themselves? Who were they – a bunch of ex-bank managers or retired accountants? And what kind of advice would they be giving?
I agreed to embark on a round-Britain trip to look at some of these Business Link Centres, just to get an idea of what they do. I’d listen in at their call centres, talk to some of their business advisers and meet the companies they were advising. I wanted to get a flavour of what was going on.
It certainly opened my eyes to what was available for small businesses. I quickly realised that these Business Link Centres were indeed very useful, if a little over-staffed. Obviously they weren’t there to give people business ideas; they were there to support and advise businesses on questions they had about matters like VAT, import and export, how to collect money from their customers, how they should approach banks, how to prepare business models and spreadsheets, all that type of stuff. The people seeking advice would have to have the seed of an idea themselves. They couldn’t jump out of bed one Monday morning, phone up a Business Link Centre and say, ‘Hello, I’d like to be in business, please. I fancy running an airline or being a dot-com millionaire – can you tell me what to do?’ Believe it or not, the Business Link Centres did get naïve calls like this, so first and foremost we needed to make sure we projected the Centres in such a way that people understood exactly what they were there for and did not have unrealistic expectations.
Paul and Richard had also arranged a fashion parade of the banks for me, as I wanted to find out whether they really were helping small- to medium-sized businesses. Clearly the banks had been beaten up badly as a result of the irresponsible lending which had led to the recent financial disaster and the subsequent injection of money from the government. They were obviously very nervous and now, when they lent money, they were making doubly sure their risks were minimised. In tightening their belts, there were some genuine stories of small businesses being squeezed – their overdrafts were being taken away, or renegotiated, or changed into long-term loans. It was true that some of the banks had taken liberties, but by the time I arrived on the scene and got stuck into the details, I discovered that this poor treatment had been for a short period of time, following the banking disaster when, as one would expect, the banks went into protective mode.
I also noticed a wave of complaints which, in my opinion, were unreasonable. Some companies were hooking on to the fact that the banks wouldn’t lend them money and accusing them of stunting the growth of their businesses. When I examined some of these businesses, I agreed with the banks – I too wouldn’t have lent them a penny. In fact, no one in their right mind would have! In some cases, these businesses were virtually bankrupt – they were simply hiding behind this fashionable trend of blaming the banks.
I spent quite a lot of time looking into this and eventually advised the government that while there was an initial problem with banks not lending, one needed to understand that there was also a lot of propaganda from companies who really weren’t worthy of being lent a penny. We needed to see the wood for the trees before beating up the banks too much over their alleged lack of co-operation.
Regrettably, I’d alienated most of the DBIS staff through my Sky TV interview. In hindsight, having met hundreds of people at the DBIS, I realised most were giving expert advice to businesses, even though they weren’t businesspeople themselves. I quite liked floating around the various floors and talking to them, listening to them and seeing what they do. It was a great learning curve. I’m one of those people who feel you have to earn your wings and you only do that by face-to-face discussions with people.
Throughout the rest of the year, I embarked upon a series of seminars around the country, visiting major towns like Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol. We invited audiences of around 800 people each day over two sessions, the idea simply being that I would answer people’s questions, giving them some advice on what they could do about their businesses. Most of the time, this went very well. However, in Manchester a gentleman said he had visited three banks and they’d each turned him down. In my long answer to him, I told him that while I wasn’t directing my reply to him personally, I wanted to take the opportunity to dispel the current rumour that banks weren’t lending to people. I pointed out that there are many companies which don’t deserve to be loaned money and that people were making excuses about banks to cover up the inadequacies of their businesses.
Unbeknown to me, a Daily Mail sniper was in the audience. I had taken the precaution of ensuring all my seminars were recorded, in anticipation of one of these journalists slipping in. I was fully prepared to take them to task if they wrote a pack of lies. In this case, the Daily Mail, as usual, decided to take my words out of context, resulting in a front-page headline stating that I had said, ‘Eighty per cent of small businesses in this country are not worth lending money to.’ It was an outrageous distortion of the truth. What I’d actually said was that we had sampled a small number of cases where businesses had been turned down for loans and that 80 per cent of those cases were justified in not being lent a penny – a completely different scenario. Nevertheless, they ran the lie on their front page and predictably it caused uproar amongst organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses. It escalated into questions being asked in the House of Lords and in the House of Commons.
For the Conservatives, this was manna from heaven. There were questions to the ministers about whether ‘Lord Sugar speaks on behalf of the government’. I was a bit disappointed that the ministers answering those questions hadn’t been fully briefed that the newspaper had lied. If they had been, the simple answer would have been, ‘We have read what has been printed in the newspaper and we assume that your questions arise from that. Our simple answer is that it’s a pack of lies. There is a recording of Lord Sugar’s seminars and we can verify that he did not say that and, therefore, we have nothing to answer.’
Instead, they were poorly prepared and gave some waffle of an answer. I was quite disappointed. You’d have thought that these people would have known by now what mischief-makers the media are, but it appeared to me that they also believed what they had read and were somewhat embarrassed trying to answer questions thrown at them by the opposition – a ridiculous scenario. I prote
sted heavily, through Paul and Richard, that in future, having gone to all the trouble of recording these seminars, they should ensure that ministers’ staff were briefed in a much better way and should consult with them first when asked questions about my activities.
The only consolation was that the Daily Mail was so far up David Cameron’s arse at the time that I guess any sensible person reading its coverage of me over the preceding months would have realised how totally biased they were. They’d gone so dramatically over the top in hounding me that normal and sane people must have been thinking to themselves, ‘What is all this Alan Sugar stuff they’re always banging on about? They’re going a bit crazy.’ I would say – and I think the rest of Fleet Street would say – that they made complete idiots of themselves.
When I compare the hostile media coverage of my entry into the political world with what I experienced in the football days, this type of sniping was different. In the football days, it was conducted by thick idiots who wrote for the tabloids; the snipers here were at a higher intellectual level.
Paul and Richard were bombarded with questions under the Freedom of Information Act about everything I was doing. All these enquiries came from the opposition offices. They must have had loads of people sitting there dreaming up all kinds of questions and hoping for an answer which revealed some juicy story they could hand over to the media. At first Paul and Richard showed me these questions. Then they saw me getting wound up and starting to get involved in replying, so in the end they didn’t even bother showing them to me. They got the measure of me and simply batted the questions away, as most of them were rubbish.
Here’s an example: ‘What computer equipment does Lord Sugar have available to him? Does he have a BlackBerry supplied by the department? If so, please supply a list of all contacts contained in the BlackBerry.’
Bloody joke! They were told to piss off, as my BlackBerry is my own.
One of the things about being a lord is that you are not allowed to speak in the House of Lords until you have made your maiden speech. One’s maiden speech has to be made on a day when one’s so-called expertise is relevant to the topic under discussion.
On 25 November 2009, the matter of enterprise and business was being discussed as part of the follow-on from the Queen’s opening of Parliament, which had taken place a week or so earlier – an amazing spectacle, as you can imagine. I decided to attend this for the first time, just to see what goes on. The chamber was filled with peers and the Queen read out her charter for the year – essentially what she wanted her government to do. As is traditional, the whole thing was broadcast. At one point, the cameras focused on me – the new boy on the block. The Daily Mail took the opportunity of taking a still frame from part of the video. At one stage, I must have looked around as if I were lost and they printed that picture with a headline saying I had been ostracised by all the other peers – a total joke.
In general, the people I’ve met so far in the House of Lords are a delightful bunch. There are, of course, the inevitable snobs who look down their noses at me as if I’m not entitled to be there, as if I’m a gatecrasher at their private party. There are others they treat this way too. In general, however, the people I’ve come across and spoken to are very polite – irrespective of what party they support – and most certainly the staff and all the executives running the Lords are exceptional in the service they provide. They all make you feel very comfortable, right down to the post-room clerks, the doormen and the restaurant and bar staff. I quite enjoy my little banter with the man in the document office, who happens to be a Chelsea supporter. Every week we exchange views about how our respective teams have done. It is a great institution and, without a shadow of a doubt, it’s a tremendous honour to be a member of it.
I decided that when entering a place like this, it’s important not to sling your weight around. There are people in the Lords who have been there for years. Some are extremely eloquent and highly intelligent speakers who are very interesting to listen to. Clearly, before I ever got anywhere near that stage I would need to do a lot of learning. There is nothing worse than a new boy coming in, shooting his mouth off and making a fool of himself. I was determined that was not going to happen.
There is only one way to earn respect, and that is by being judged on what you say and what you do. I made my maiden speech on 25 November. It lasted no more than eight minutes and was well received by the House, though I was a bit nervous until I got into my flow.
In the first six months of being in the House of Lords, I quickly learned what to say and what not to say. It was pointless talking to the media any more. One thing became abundantly clear – that, more by default than shrewdness, my refusal to become a minister was a good call, and not just for the reasons I explained previously. Having sat through a lot of‘question time’ sessions at the House of Lords, I can see that the ministers who have to answer the questions must be experts in their field and have a full knowledge on their subject. For me to have been thrown in at the deep end and required to answer questions in technical detail would have been impossible, at least initially. I would have needed at least six months of permanent study to get to grips with the detail required to fend off any questions.
However, I was starting to pick up some of the tricks of the trade. Apart from some of the very nice people I’ve met at the Lords, I also came across, on a day-to-day basis, some of the people appointed to Gordon Brown’s Business Council. You can see from the look on some of their faces that they didn’t think my appointment to the House of Lords or as Enterprise Adviser was a clever idea. In the same way as I’ve described the husbands of the women who compliment me on my performance in The Apprentice, these people have a false smile and tend to just tolerate me. They think I’m a wanker because they’ve formed an opinion of me either from what they’ve seen on TV or what they’ve read in the papers.
Maybe they’re simply jealous. I am not a schmoozer – I’m not prepared to suck up to these people just to get their admiration, and I certainly don’t have to justify myself to them. Let’s face it, many of them have simply worked for companies all their lives, or are glorified civil servants – ex-lawyers and accountants. At the end of the day, like it or not, I’m Alan Sugar, worth a few hundred million quid from sheer hard graft. Having said all that, there are some fine people on the Business Council, one of them being Richard Branson, who grew up in the same era as me. He’s a man to be admired and I like to think there is some mutual respect between the two of us.
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Due to my commitments, I stayed in the UK until late December 2009, before going to Florida for Christmas. Ann went ahead of me, a week or so earlier. When I arrived, I could see a rather pained and worried look on her face. She told me that while I was on my flight she’d heard that her father had been taken ill with symptoms that didn’t look too clever. In the past year or so, Ann had told me and the kids that she was concerned about the decline in Johnnie’s health. He’d lost his appetite and was getting thinner. And, to make matters worse, it seemed he was losing his marbles a bit, constantly repeating himself and asking the same questions over and over again.
Johnnie was a very stubborn man. He’d visited the hospital for a checkup a year or so earlier and was advised to have a series of tests to investigate some things they were concerned about. However, he refused any further medical examination, his principle being, ‘If you look, you will find.’ Ann was very frustrated with this, but he would not change his ways. But this new episode frightened him and his wife Minnie, so he agreed to let Ann’s brother Mark and my daughter Louise (who thankfully were in the UK) arrange immediate medical consultations.
Sadly, Johnnie was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given only a few months to live. He was a very difficult man and in his younger days he had little regard for other people’s ways. Even in later life, his wife Minnie, and to a certain extent Ann, danced around him so that everything he wanted was laid on and organised for him. This medical stuff thre
w a real spanner in the works, and Ann and Mark decided to keep the severity of his situation hidden from him – they both agreed there was no way he could handle it. In fact, Minnie didn’t want to accept the reality that he had only months to live.
As the weeks went by and Johnnie got weaker, the whole family witnessed the most terrible sight of this once very forceful, powerful and opinionated man wither away until, sadly, he died on 3 April 2010 at the age of eighty-eight. Having seen his deterioration, at least her father’s death did not come as a shock to Ann, but even so she was very upset when the actual moment came.
Johnnie died right in the middle of the Jewish festival of Pesach. In terms of Jewish law, if ever there is a good time to leave this earth, it’s not during a festival. I knew that, in keeping with Jewish tradition, Johnnie would have wanted to be buried as soon as possible. So out of respect for his deeply held beliefs and his love of his religion, I wanted to arrange this for him. I will keep this very short and simply say that I had him in the ground within twenty-two hours of his death. You would not believe the twists and turns it took to achieve this – considering it was a festival – save to say it would have made a tough Apprentice task.
We only got confirmation at 12.30 p.m. on 4 April that the funeral would be at 4 p.m. that day, so it was amazing to see the number of people who turned up. Not just the extended family, but members of the community from both Chigwell and Southend.
The traditional shiva was held at my home and hundreds of people came to pay their respects. One touching moment was when my nephew read out a lovely eulogy to his grandfather which encapsulated everyone’s thoughts.