The urge to be Sir Alan’s apprentice

When Sir Alan Sugar set up Amstrad selling car aerials nearly 40 years ago there was no television programme to encourage budding entrepreneurs. Britain was locked in an era of corporatism in which the conventional aspiration was to work for a multinational such as Shell or to be a civil servant.

In fact, the two were much the same, offering the anonymity, security and shared responsibility of the large organisation with its annual pay review and pensions scheme. It was by joining the Ministry of Education as a statistician when he left school at 17 that Sugar realised working for himself had to be better.

It has taken a long time for the country to share that view. But after decades when business was regarded as vulgar, entrepreneurship has become respectable again. That doesn’t always mean wanting to build a huge empire like a Branson or Hanson; small business is beautiful too.