Sugar isn’t the only one to ask that question: analysts in the City want to know if this shrewd businessman is quite as shrewd as he used to be. After all, Amstrad – a conflation of “AMS” (Alan Michael Sugar) and “trad”, for trading – was once worth £1.2 billion. Now it’s worth £180m. In 2004 Sugar couldn’t even drag himself along to the AGM. Pensions Investment Research Consultants (PIRC), an organisation that advises on corporate governance, recommended that the Amstrad shareholders get rid of him – and fast.
It shouldn’t bother Sugar – according to the 2005 Sunday Times Rich List, he’s worth an estimated £760m. But it does. “The shareholders are looked after by me,” he says. “And they should be very thankful. I run Amstrad as if it was my own. They get their accounts every year, their profits and dividends. And if they don’t like it, they should sell their shares. But I’ll run my – the – company the way I want to. Not the way some twat in the City wants me to.”
The old-school bluster fits perfectly with the Bentley and its smell of stale cigar smoke. But Sugar actually prefers the Rolls-Royce with the personalised numberplate, AMS 1. “The numberplate was just a bit of fun,” he says. “It’s 40 years old. I had it on my bloody mini van.” He knows it’s a bit, well, wide. Wide or not, it didn’t stop him buying AS-1 for his wife, Ann. As Sugar walks towards his front door, he looks like a man totally at ease with himself. A man who doesn’t give a monkey’s. A man with nothing to prove.
His house isn’t a marble monument to excess. Not a bit of it. Apart from the private lounge bar with premium optics. The grounds are modest, and from the living-room sofa you can see the top of the drive and the bottom of the garden. It’s a six- or seven-bedroom (“depends whether you’re buying or selling,” says Sugar) executive home, with two tennis courts, a swimming pool and video entry phone. When you consider that the owner is three times richer than Madonna, it doesn’t seem excessive at all.
Sugar bought the house in Chigwell, Essex, 26 years ago. Admittedly, he has two others – one in Spain and one in America – but why would he choose to set up home in Chigwell?
“I was born in Hackney,” he says. “When you’re born in Hackney and you do well in life, you move to Chigwell.” It’s also handy for the M11 and the M25, with easy rail links into central London and, well, Brentwood. And Brentwood is the home of Amstrad’s headquarters.
Sugar walks into the living room and perches on the sofa. He adjusts his cufflinks and sighs. In his book The Apprentice: How to Get Hired Not Fired, it says: “Learn to read body language.” And if I’m reading it right, I feel like I’m looking at what Sugar calls “the silent close”. “It is usually used after the point when you have proffered your best deal and you’re implying, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m going now, this is your last chance.’” It’s a little early for “the silent close”, but Sugar is hoping to keep the interview brief. The room is full of family photographs. By the french windows is a pile of oversized books by La Rochefoucauld. The 17th-century French writer had a cynical, misanthropic view of the world. “True eloquence consists in saying all that should be said,” he wrote, “and that only.” Sugar is famous for saying nothing but what is necessary. His favourite e-mails read “yes” and “no”. He is no fan of small talk.
He used to own a 160ft super-yacht, the Louisiana, but he decided it wasn’t cost-effective. Now he owns planes. But Sugar’s only real love is his family – and he’s proud of the dynasty that he’s building. His friend and PR man, Nick Hewer, remembers having lunch with him one day when the phone rang. “It was some bloke who had gone to a property auction for Sir Alan,” says Hewer. “He ended the phone call, turned to me and said, ‘Got it – lovely building in the middle of Liverpool. It’s for the grandchildren.’”
Hewer remembers the time that Sugar sent a fax to a video-recorder manufacturer in China. “Brilliantly funny,” he says. “They had the office rolling around. ‘Dear Mr Ching Chang Chong, we received your video. It is shit.’ All spelt out in bold. In capital letters. Every sentence a few words long. There was no fear of Mr Ching Chang Chong misunderstanding exactly what he was saying. His use of language is very explicit, but he has this real ability to communicate.”
If he wants to. After all, he is the man who turned down Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. The man who refused a Bailey photoshoot. And the man who declined dinner at No 10 because it clashed with his birthday. He did go on Room 101 – but only because it was one of his favourite shows – and listed “men who wear wigs” as one of his pet hates. But when Paul Merton asked him to wear a wig, as a joke, Sugar cut him dead. It was painful to watch. Sugar doesn’t like someone else being boss. That’s his job.
Sugar wants to be a straight-talking, no-nonsense role model. That’s why he agreed to present the BBC reality show The Apprentice. He had an idea that the first series would be a masterclass in business (it wasn’t) and a showcase for the best in entrepreneurial talent (it wasn’t that either). But it did give an insight into Sugar’s way of doing things. As he says at the beginning of The Apprentice, “I don’t like liars. I don’t like cheats. I don’t like bullshitters. I don’t like schmoozers. I don’t like arse-lickers.”
Sugar made business look sexy. The first series was enough of a success for him to agree to a second, putting another set of entrepreneurs through the most gruelling job interview of their lives. Sugar says he’s still looking for “the next me”. And considering he’s nearly a billionaire, there’s been no shortage of volunteers. “But you can forget about flashing your eyes or having a handsome attack. It ain’t gonna impress me.”
