Alan Sugar’s recent comments have come back to haunt him, after The Apprentice UK star tweeted about his former US counterpart’s coronavirus diagnosis.
On Friday morning, Lord Sugar reacted to the news that the US president and first lady had contracted Covid-19, saying he hoped this would encourage Trump to take the pandemic more seriously.
“[Donald Trump] and his wife have covid,” he tweeted. “Will he finally wake up and realise this is a dangerous pandemic. Not as he said in March just a flu.”
However, soon after sharing his post, many social media users began reminding Lord Sugar of his own recent comments about coronavirus, not least when he suggested that people in the UK should start returning to offices, and that those who had been working from home during the crisis had become “complacent”...
During an appearance on This Morning last month, the entrepreneur clashed with Phillip Schofield as they discussed the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Excuse me, excuse me,” he said. “I am sick and tired of watching CNN, Sky, Bloomberg, BBC, the lot, because all they do is cause panic amongst people.
“I’m not interested in any of this stuff because you can switch the television on anytime of day and the first thing you see is some more bad news.”
In the same interview, Lord Sugar claimed: “Those people who like working from home have become a bit complacent… There’s a fine line of fearful and enjoying it, to be honest with you. It’s as simple as that.
“What are they fearful of? I’ve got a factory down the road from here that has 300 people that have been working all throughout the pandemic. We have got proper processes in place.”
Over the summer, Lord Sugar also suggested that Boris Johnson was being “a little too cautious” during an interview with Jeremy Vine from his home in Florida.
He mused: “I just, logically, say ‘well hold on... we’ve come out of this so-called lockdown, who’s dead? I’m not. I’m still alive’. My wife, thank god, is still alive. So’s everybody else I know. No one else has caught anything.
“So I suppose it’s a bit of a clue there that says maybe we’ve reached a peak, and maybe it’s time for us to follow the example of America, or indeed France, that have opened up, or indeed Spain.”