Brown Sugar
The recession ended in May. Whether or not you believe that to be true, the one thing Gordon Brown hasn’t had to worry about recently is the economy, which is staging something of a fightback.
It looks like output will start to grow again by the end of the year. But the recovery will be sluggish, and could be short-lived – and swingeing job cuts and business insolvencies could make it feel far worse next year. So what are we to make of the bizarre appointment of Sir Alan Sugar to the House of Lords as enterprise tsar? A serious man for serious times, no doubt.
Sugar seems to have a lifelong gift for boarding sinking ships, leaving computers for property and property for politics. Yet, as he has shown on The Apprentice, at least he is comfy on camera – which is more than the PM can say. How Gordon Brown must envy him. He doesn’t have charm. There’s no sign of any emotional intelligence. His sense of humour is oddly stunted and he’s stubborn, arrogant and mouthy. And yet the public not only love him, but back him in their millions with their remote control. But will he get results?
Sugar’s stated aim is “to help out businesses and act as a kind of giant Dragon’s Den… although not with my money”; he plans to act as an intermediary between banks and companies. But that may be as empty a promise to the average small business as every other emergency enterprise package: you only get the cash if you can show you don’t need it.
Sugar’s recent track record in business hasn’t exactly been brilliant, and he’s not always the most prescient forecaster: “Next Christmas, the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput,” he predicted in 2005. But there’s a lot more to him than boardroom bluster. The Amstrad PC genuinely revolutionised consumer electronics in Britain, and that alone makes him a business visionary. But that was a long time ago and you’d think the less-than-happy experience of Lord (Digby) Jones in Whitehall would have dulled Brown’s enthusiasm for bringing bumptious businessmen into the big tent.
You can’t help thinking the PM has missed a trick. Who better to knock the banks into line than Sugar’s sidekick, Margaret Mountford? The strategic application of that sceptical scowl and cocked eyebrows would soon stop them coming up with another fiasco like subprimes. Never mind Lord Sugar, bring on lady Salt.