Another Sugar-coated message

You might have seen some reports on TV news yesterday that appeared to show Alan Sugar getting unnecessarily shirty with a BBC reporter.

There were indeed bleeped-out expletives and rolled eyes when the reporter asked him a question about how we get out of recession.

Lord Sugar was having none of it: “Can’t we get off this bloody recession kick once and for all?”

The reporter thought he’d have the last word with a voiceover pointing out that it was the Government that Lord Sugar is an ambassador for that had produced figures “which show Britain is still in recession.”

Only that’s not quite right.

The figures which the reporter referred to said the country was in recession during the three months to the end of September.
Some people are a bit suspicious about those figures (which often get revised upwards at a later date). The consensus among quite a few business people is that if it was then it’s not now.
And Alan Sugar’s central point is this: moaning about recession will not get your business out of it.
Now, the media can sometimes get a bit recession-happy (though not as much as it was in the early 1980s, when the end of the world seemed nigh on News at Ten), but the longest recession in living memory isn’t something you casually brush aside.
There’s also the feeling that Lord Sugar is far too much of a straight-talker to be a frontman for Government economic strategy.
He’d be in good company here: Digby Jones, who was also ennobled and made a Government adviser on international trade, would regularly vent his frustration at the way that same Government did things.
As anyone who went to see Lord Sugar in Nottingham will know, his recipe for business does not include calling the doctor when your company feels unwell.
Indeed, the Alan Sugar Theory of Business Management boils down to this: stop whinging and get on with it.