Secret Santa and Sugar

I take it all back. The best Wikileaks joke - with thanks to Martin Orpen and about a million people on Twitter - is:
Freedom of speech - priceless. For everything else there's Mastercard.
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For 17 years I have worked as part of a two man band. No secretaries, support staff, admin, bosses or serfs. Okay, so it means we have our Christmas parties in a phone box and the annual day out is quite cheap. And though we have shared our offices with various PR oddballs and freelances, it has allowed us a lot of autonomy.
But in the New Year that is going to change, at least in part, as we move to a four storey building where we are expected to mingle and interact with, gulp, OTHER PEOPLE.
We have had our first taste of what to expect by being invited to participate in our prospective new office's secret Santa. I've never been entirely familiar with this concept but I'm learning.
We have been told who we have to spend a fiver on and that someone we have never met is spending a fiver on us. I have to buy something for this bloke who sold his last company (Pet Plan actually) for £30 million. What do you get a man who has everything. Especially when you've only got a fiver to spend. I don't even know if he likes football so that rules out pretty much everything I can ever think of to buy a bloke.
At least Beyonce bought Jay-Z a £1.3 million sports car. As if she wasn't perfect enough already! She could buy me a packet of crisps and I'd still be prepared to make her the third Mrs Solomons. Only joking Sue (she's the same about Clive Owen by the way.)
Back to our new office. The portents aren't good. It starts with Secret Santa and I bet within a month we'll be expected to buy everyone cupcakes whenever there's a birthday. Still, there's the office party next week with our new colleagues and it will be nice to pull a cracker with someone else for a change.
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I now realise I'm the last person in Britain who knew that one of the X Factor acts is called Wand Erection.
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I used to like Alan Sugar. Really I did. Not just because he rescued my football team from financial ruin, or that he came from the East End and moved to Essex. He just seemed to be a genuine grafter who came up the hard way, as he continually points out.
Even the fact his company was Amstrad didn't dent his likeability. Someone I know had a summer job at the Amstrad factory in the 1980s. Their job was to send out new machines to all the people who sent their failed old ones in. Some were on their fourth or fifth and would send letters begging for their money back rather than yet another computer. The instructions were to send them a new one.
The point is, and I realise an awful lot of people out there came to this conclusion a long time ago, but he's not a very likeable person any more (any more?) I don't think he's as clever as he thinks he is. His rags to riches shtick is a bit boring now and he's really not that funny or charming even though he thinks this is why people like him.
Neither does he seem particularly genuine these days. I met him now and again and he was okay. I remember getting him to write a piece on Thatcher when she got kicked out by her own party and he fawned over her in 500 words. That was before he put his head up Blair and Brown's backside, subsequently becoming Lord Sugar and joining the government not long before they got kicked out too.
But now he seems to go on Twitter every five minutes to slag someone off. Fine, Chris Evans and that Kirstie woman who sells houses are fair game but the insults are generally juvenile, on a level with calling someone fatty or poo poo head.
I think the problem may be Nick Hewer, his terminally nice right hand man. In the old days, all Sugar's public utterings went through Nick (Nick hated football and when Sugar took over Spurs, realising I was a fan, he used to ring me up and ask me what I thought of various players so he could bring them into a conversation with Sugar). Now that Sugar has access to Twitter he's like a child with a toy and can say what he likes without the sensible Nick being able to temper it.
Thus Sugar now comes across as a pastiche of a grumpy old millionaire who thinks he is incredibly witty and urbane but is more Kim Wilde than Oscar Wilde (I wish I could think of a better example of someone called either Oscar or Wilde. Kim's not that bad.)
Oh well, I'm fired....Solly
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