Muriel Gray

ON either side of the globe, prime ministers are making public statements about matters of the utmost importance. While the world boils with climate change, economic disaster and war, the elected leaders of Australia and the United Kingdom are discussing what's really important to us all. Reality television personalities. In the antipodes, prime minister Kevin Rudd is concerned about TV cook Gordon Ramsay, and here, our own dear leader Gordon Brown has similar weighty issues on his mind.

We're all aware, and deeply concerned, that our prime minister appears to have actually gone mad, what with taking the time to phone Piers Morgan about Susan Boyle's health while his government implodes and our country teeters in the edge of bankruptcy, but who could have foreseen the latest barking psychosis?

I refer, with regret, to the embarrassing Alan Sugar thing. In case you missed it, in these times of financial meltdown the government has decided that we need a financial tsar, someone to help inspire the country's business community, bring examples of innovation, creativity and bold new working practices to a young workforce to move us forward to a 21st-century way of thinking about prosperity and growth.

For this task the prime minister looked far and wide, pondering the subtle merits of the hundreds of innovators we boast in Britain, searching for the best candidate to breathe new life into a beleaguered sector. All right then, he did nothing of the sort. He just looked in the Radio Times and saw some beardy guy pointing a stubby finger at the camera above a caption reading: "You're fired."

The only positive aspect of Brown's utterly ridiculous choice of Alan Sugar, as both a government advisor and new peer, is that the almost universal mockery and derision with which the announcement has been met proves that we are not as stupid as the government thinks we are. Unlike elected politicians we can actually tell the difference between pretend things on TV and real things in the real world.

It's breathtaking that Sugar has been elevated thus, and worse in that while he takes the flak, none of it is really his fault. In marketing speak, Alan Sugar "is what he is". It's shorthand for saying there is nothing more to the subject than that which meets the eye. Serpentine Peter Mandelson calls The Apprentice "Alan Sugar's programme". It's nothing of the sort. It's the programme belonging to a man called Mark Burnett, and he franchises it all over the world, currently in 19 countries including Estonia, Turkey and Brazil. Sugar is simply the UK presenter, and, according to inside sources, it may be that he wasn't even the first choice. The wish list included, amongst others, Phillip Green, but allegedly he was too busy actually being a businessman.

Nothing wrong with any of that. It's a terrific show. Sugar does what he's told by the producers, appears to follow a script as he often stumbles over the words, and is probably, if other reality shows are the benchmark, told by the production team which contestant to fire each week.

In return he seems to relish a high public profile, which most very rich entrepreneurs neither have nor desire. The inconvenience of having to bury a new, unwanted, £100,000-a-year employee somewhere in his empire at the end of series is offset by Sugar's own gains. Everyone wins.

The contestants are of course nothing remotely like genuine business people. They are chosen, in common with their franchised global counterparts, because they are ghastly caricatures who are enjoyable to watch on account of being such monsters. It's television entertainment, not business.

So if we all know this stuff, why hasn't anyone told the prime minister? He can't actually think Sugar is inspirational, can he? What lessons are we supposed to learn from Sir Alan? He's a man, who after his disgraceful treatment of one female contestant on the show by cross-examining her on childcare arrangements, has gone on record saying that the best way to get round the law forbidding such anti-female prejudice in an interview is simply to not hire them at all. His weekly performance in the TV "boardroom" is one of gratuitous rudeness, bullying, and the constant parading of a creaking prehistoric philosophy grounded on a staggering lack of formal education. This is the stuff of the 1970s. No-one has behaved like this and expected success for decades.

Sugar made his money in the classic barrow boy fashion, making Amstrad computers massively successful by manufacturing the components more cheaply than rivals. The simple buy low, sell high philosophy has made the company a huge success, and for this he can be congratulated. But it's never been famous for innovation or creativity. Any forays into territory that doesn't fit his old-school business model have performed badly, and his prediction a few years ago that the iPod would be here today, gone tomorrow, is a revealing insight into how Sugar flounders outside his comfort zone.

However, this is not an attack on the innocent Alan Sugar. His only crime is vanity. It's Mandelson and Brown who need taken to account over this lunacy. If Sugar's television persona, the pantomime misogynist with an embarrassing and prehistoric approach to business, is the one that New Labour admires and wishes us to emulate, then things are even more depressing than they seem. Of course worse still could be the possibility that they just want him because "he's off the telly". Either way it's excruciating, and, at a time when we so badly need to kick-start British business, pretty much unforgivable.

And so to Australia's prime minister Kevin Rudd, spending precious ministerial time to comment on Gordon Ramsay's foul insults to TV host Tracy Grimshaw, too vile, sexist and childish to bear repeating. Rudd took time out to call Ramsay a "new form of low life". Actually, come to think of it, that's not a bad use of governmental time. Carry on, Mr Rudd.