Do we like them?

Do we like Lord Alan Sugar?

Our score: 4 out of 10. Not a villain and he has done some real giving, but the non-binary jibe and the deleted tweets outweigh it.

Alan Sugar is the Amstrad founder who became the face of The Apprentice and, since 2009, a member of the House of Lords. He left the Labour Party in 2015, citing its business policies, and now sits as a crossbencher. He told reporters in March 2025 he had signed up to front the show until at least 2029.

Nothing new has turned up on him lately beyond the usual Apprentice noise, so there is no fresh blow-up to report. The series that ended this April is the latest big thing on his record, and the reporting we found on it was mostly about jokes and format, not harm.

The harm check starts with 2019, when he told The Sun that people who promote non-binary pronouns should be “shipped out of the country”, naming Mongolia. He added “They need to pack it in, it's nonsense”, and said the world had gone mad. That is mockery of a group of people, not a policy campaign, but it is the sort of line that stings.

The tweets are the rest of the pattern. In 2018 he posted a doctored image of Jeremy Corbyn with Hitler, brushed off critics at first, then deleted it and apologised to John McDonnell for causing offence. The same year he posted an image of Senegal's football team that drew accusations of racism, and he deleted it and apologised. In 2020 he shared a claim that the coronavirus was made in a lab, which Full Fact debunked, then called it “fake news” while saying he had “just passed it on”.

In 2022 he tweeted that all the commentators on women's football were women and asked if he should complain about a lack of men. Ian Wright and Gabby Logan pushed back, and Sugar kept going rather than backing down. It is a small thing, but the deleted tweets and the doubling down say something about how he handles being wrong.

On the good-person side, a tribunal threw out a former Apprentice winner's constructive dismissal claim against him in 2013, calling it “a claim that should never have been brought”. He also gave a £7,500 libel payout to the domestic abuse charity Refuge. As a peer he has a thin record: reports in 2024 said he had not voted since 2017 and last spoke in the Lords in 2018.