Lord Sugar

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Charlie Burden. Lord Sugar

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

LORD SUGAR OF CLAPTON

HONESTY

HARD WORK AND ENTERPRISE

FAMILY VALUES AND LOYALTY

PATRIOTISM

CHARITY AND INSPIRATION

ENTERTAINMENT

COURAGE

A FINE FUTURE?

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright

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Title Page

PART ONE

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Increased hostility from the press was something Lord Sugar would have to become accustomed to in politics. Not that this was anything new. He remembers how, at the age of 15, he became properly aware of the political scene and the office of Prime Minister in particular. ‘It was the first time I signed on to why the country needs a leader,’ he explained. This, however, did not signify automatic respect from Sugar for the men who filled the role. Echoing his respect for leaders who eschew showbiz popularity in favour of good, sensible politics, he added: ‘In those days a Prime Minister was seen as stuffy, perhaps boring, but a serious person – a person you trusted to guide the country through the challenges it faced both at home and abroad.’ For many of the public Sugar’s preference for a reliable, old-fashioned politician ahead of a showbiz version will ring true. After spin dominated the 1990s and beyond, people want what Sugar wants and offers: sincerity ahead of celebrity.

Sugar’s first involvement in the ways of Westminster came several decades ago. He first walked the corridors of Whitehall in the 1960s, when he took a job in the civil service as a statistician at the Ministry of Education and Science. If this seems an unlikely path – full of red-tape, onerous procedures and jobsworths – for a man like Sugar to take, then that’s because it is. ‘It bores me talking about it again and again,’ he says now. He took it simply as a result of what he had and had not enjoyed during his schooling. ‘Science – this was something I had always been interested it. Statistics, maths – I wasn’t too bad at that. So I thought I’d go for it.’ He found the deskbound job to be ‘total agony’, however, and could not wait for each working day to end so he could get home. So dull was the work, he recalls, that the task of calculating what percentage of schoolchildren drank milk in the morning was one of the more exciting tasks. ‘Imagine my disappointment when I was plonked into a boring office, pushing a load of paper around,’ he remembered. He sat each day, waiting for the clock to hit 5pm.

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