IN AMERICA the race for title of Most Hated Man is currently a run-off between George Bush, Simon Cowell and Donald Trump.
All three have, it is true, their fans too, but only the President is running in a popularity contest; the other two just judge them, Cowell on American Idol, the American version of Pop Idol, and the billionaire Trump on The Apprentice, which yesterday began on BBC Two. Every episode of this reality series ends with a contender for a dream job within the Trump organisation being told by the great man “You’re fired”. The audition process continues until the orgasmic climax in which Trump pronounces “You’re hired”, and the winner trots off to run a Trump pleasure dome.
Next year the BBC unveils its own version of The Apprentice with Trump replaced by Sir Alan Sugar, the 57-year-old founder of Amstrad, famous for its cheap and cheerful home electronics. The winner will get to work not in Xanadu, but at Sugar’s HQ in Brentwood, Essex. The stakes may be reduced, but Sugar’s short-fused personality is being counted on to keep the drama at Trump Tower levels. Known as “Richard Branson with a personality bypass”, Sugar has not got where he is today by playing the nice guy.
Taking in this interview on the way to the airport, he swaggers into a West London hotel looking, to be honest, every inch the gangster: crinkly haircut, a boxer’s face, a stripy wide-lapelled suit, a heavily cufflinked grey shirt and a fitful cigar. He is accompanied by a funereal, chalky-faced business associate dressed in black, whom I fear is a hitman PR but who, in fact, sits in silence next to us and is no trouble at all. Sir Alan is no real trouble either, even though he is meant to hold journalists in contempt. He falls short of cuddlesome, but nor is he the abrasive monster of the profiles written during his spectacularly troubled years as chairman of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.
“I think the poor reputation I had, sometimes deservedly, of ‘needing a charisma bypass’ as someone once put it, was brought about by the horrible people that I had to deal with in that industry,” he explains to me. “It made me a very tight and protective person, not wanting to speak to anybody, thinking everybody’s got an angle, everybody’s out to try and get me. So I think coming out of that environment has released in me a much better person. I used to be quite a good joker and enjoy having a laugh but a lot of my friends said to me ‘Since you’ve been involved in bloody Tottenham you’ve changed’. I did. It was a wasted ten years of my life. It was a problem given to my family. No one deserved it really.”
Did Ann, his wife of 30 years, universally praised for her niceness, encourage him to get out? “All the time in the end, yeah, absolutely. She never encouraged me to get in. Let’s put it this way.”
Brought up a poor tailor’s son in a Hackney council flat, he had been a Spurs fan for as long as he could remember. By the late Eighties his Amstrad computers (Amstrad acronymically derives from his original Alan Michael Sugar Trading Company) had made him seriously wealthy, at its zenith earning a stock market valuation of £1.2 billion. Buying the club in 1991 was a rich man’s present to himself.
It turned out to be an act of self-harm committed with a poisoned chalice. Within months he was rowing with the Spurs’ chief executive, Terry Venables, a feud that ended up with Sugar firing him, trashing El Tel’s biography in a Sunday newspaper and then suing him for libel. He also clashed with the Football Association after he revealed that the club had not been above offering the odd “bung” to facilitate transfers. The FA rewarded the whistle-blower by banning Spurs from the FA Cup and docking it 12 league points, a punishment he resorted to law to get overturned. Meanwhile, the fans and the papers complained that he was more interested in profits than trophies and a niggard when it came to buying talent. Although he put some £100 million into the club and spent £70 million on players, fans harassed him on his mobile phone and at his home in Essex.
“I was naive. No question. Now (in soccer) I’ve seen a different world of fraudsters, tricksters, liars, cheats, but my business background was dealing with Japanese people: hard, tough, but honest. Honour.”
And not wanting anything in a brown envelope? “No, no.”
So that’s what went wrong at Tottenham? “What went wrong was, I think, my persistence in thinking that perhaps I could make it a successful business and also successful on the football pitch. What went wrong is my poor reading of the situation. After year in, year out trying to do things that way, what went wrong was it took me too long to realise that I was pissing in the wind, literally wasting my time, banging my head up against the wall. That’s what went wrong. My fault.
“It was a waste of my life. I think a clever person, a clever outside observer who wants to do a commercial analysis on me, should track Amstrad’s results throughout the course of that ten years, then track them now. After I leave Tottenham and get back to concentrating on Amstrad, you start to see the profits rising again. And that tells a story. No one’s picked up on that really. The story is, I suppose, I’m a one-horse pony man, or whatever you want to call it. When I give my attention to something I tend to give it all and I think, in hindsight, that, apart from me losing ten years out of my life, Amstrad shareholders actually lost me for a while. I took my eye off the ball for a wasted, hopeless, ungrateful bunch of people.”
Amstrad’s batteries did go flat in the Nineties. A year after he bought Spurs the company recorded a £70 million loss. In 1994, against his better judgment, he was persuaded to allow non-executive directors to hire a chief executive. Although Amstrad’s profits rose for the first time in four years, in Sugar’s view it was like “watching your mother-in-law drive your Ferrari off a cliff”. In 1997 Amstrad was broken up. This summer, however, the remains of the group reported a before-tax profit of £15.6 million and shareholders received increased dividends. Amstrad now makes set-top decoders for Sky and for the Italian broadcaster Sky Italia; its eccentric-looking e-mail phones, to be spotted in the windows of Dixons, are, after three years, making money. Last month he launched a new model, the E3 Videophone, which will get you on to the internet and in visual contact with any other proud owner.
