The Right Honourable The Lord Sugar |
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Sugar at the 2009 BAFTAs
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Born |
Alan Michael Sugar 24 March 1947 Hackney, East London, England |
Residence | Chigwell, Essex, UK |
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Entrepreneur, celebrity, author, politician |
Political party | Independent (2015-) Labour(1997–2015) |
Spouse(s) | Ann Sugar, Baroness Sugar (née Simons) (m. 1968) |
Children | Simon Sugar Daniel Sugar Louise Sugar |
Relatives | Rita Simons (niece-by-marriage) |
HM Government Enterprise Advisor | |
Assumed office 25 May 2016 |
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Member of the House of Lords Lord Temporal |
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Assumed office 20 July 2009 Life Peerage |
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Alan Michael Sugar, Baron Sugar (born 24 March 1947) is a British business magnate. He is also a media personality, politician and political adviser. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, Sugar became a billionaire in 2015. In 2016 they estimated his fortune at £1.15bn, and ranked him as the 95th richest person in the UK. In 2007, he sold his remaining interest in the consumer electronics company Amstrad, his largest business venture.
Sugar was chairman of Tottenham Hotspur from 1991 to 2001. Sugar appears in the BBC TV series The Apprentice, which has been broadcast annually since 2005 and is based on the US television show of the same name.
Sugar was born in Hackney, East London, into a Jewish family. His father Nathan was a tailor in the garment industry of the East End.
When Sugar was young, his family lived in a council flat. Because of his profuse, curly hair, he was nicknamed "Mop head", a name that he still goes by in the present day. He attended Northwold Primary School and then Brooke House Secondary School in Upper Clapton, Hackney, and made extra money by working at a greengrocers. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked briefly for the civil service as a statistician at the Ministry of Education. He began selling radio aerials for cars and other electrical goods out of a van which he had bought for £50 and insured for £8. To afford this, he withdrew all of his postal savings which totalled just £100.
Lord Sugar is an atheist, but remains proud of his Jewish heritage. Sugar and his wife Ann (née Simons) married on 28 April 1968; they have two sons, Simon and Daniel and a daughter Louise. The couple live in Chigwell, Essex. Ann is the paternal aunt of former EastEnders actress Rita Simons.