Sir Alan Sugar, the entrepreneur and television star, lent celebrity ballast to Gordon Brown yesterday, starting the job with characteristic fire by immediately attacking the civil servants he will soon be working with.

The gravel-voiced host of The Apprentice will be given a peerage in return for an unpaid role advising Lord Mandelson on ways to help small business succeed.

Sir Alan, 62, who will not become a minister, has already been cleared to present next year’s series of The Apprentice despite his new role, his advisers said yesterday.

The Prime Minister said that his appointment showed “we have got some of the best talent in British business prepared to work in the Government”.

However, the appointment received a lukewarm reception in the City. Richard Lambert, Director-General of the CBI, called it entertaining. He added: “You can’t really put a laugh in a quote can you?”

There was anger in the Labour Party and the House of Lords at the appointment. Baroness Prosser, the Labour peer and a former party treasurer, said she was “completely astonished” at the appointment.

“Sir Alan Sugar is a person who promotes a management style on his TV show The Apprentice that is based on bullying and sexism. He should not be speaking for the Government,” she said.

There may also be complications with the House of Lords Appointments Commission, since new peers are asked to commit themselves to spending time in the Lords chamber.

The appointment is likely to trigger alarm bells among trade unions and equal opportunities campaigners. Sir Alan grilled one TV contestant applying for a job — Katie Hopkins, a mother — about her childcare arrangements. He suggested that she might not be fully committed to the job.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives seized on a savage personal attack on Mr Brown by Sir Alan during the previous recession. The businessman, who made his millions setting up the Amstrad computer company, complained at the time that “Labour offers no sort of route out of recession”.

Writing in 1992, he said: “I do not know who Mr Gordon Brown is. Excuse my ignorance, but I don’t. Whoever he is, he has not done his homework properly. The man doesn’t know what he is talking about.”

On the announcement of his appointment, Sir Alan took to the airwaves and criticised civil servants in the Business Department, pledging to “guide them in the right direction”.

“It has been lacking in the past of people who really know first-hand what is needed in business. I cannot take on a ministerial role and I must not be a person making policy.

“All I can do is advise those that are in charge of making policy from a business point of view as to what is right and what is wrong. I am doing it because of the need of the country, really. It is not politically motivated . . . I think that small businesses and people need help.

“With all due respect to the people in Victoria Street, they are what they are, they are civil servants, they have never actually been in business. You have got to have someone there to guide them in the right direction.”

Lord Mandelson said that Sir Alan was “just one heck of a man and you will see him pioneering enterprise, backing small and medium-sized enterprises around the country.

“That’s what we need. If we are going to succeed economically in this country, we are going to have that sort of success and Alan Sugar’s going to help us achieve it.”

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