Lord Sugar previously said Ken Livingstone is “obsessed” with “Hitler, concentration camps and Jews”Freddie Dyke

Lord Alan Sugar yesterday visited and spoke at the Cambridge Union, where the conversation straddled a number of contemporary issues: from the state of the Labour Party and the recent London mayoral election, to Donald Trump and the state of entrepreneurship in the 21st century.

A floor question turned the conversation to the topical discussion of allegations of anti-Semitism within Labour Party ranks. Lord Sugar admitted that there were a “few stupid people” in the party who made “a few stupid comments” but felt that racism within the Labour Party was no more of an issue than in other political parties.

Two weeks ago, the day after Ken Livingstone made claims on radio that Adolf Hitler supported Zionism before the Holocaust, Lord Sugar told BBC 5 Live Breakfast that such comments were “stupid and ignorant” and that Livingstone was “obsessed” with “Hitler, concentration camps and Jews”.

It’s not the first time the two men have publicly disagreed. Four years ago, when Ken Livingstone was the Labour Party’s candidate in the London mayoral elections, Lord Sugar – then a Labour peer – announced on Twitter that he thought no one should vote for Livingstone. Under party rules, Labour members are not supposed to recommend a vote for anyone but a Labour candidate, but party officials, keen to play down the row, pointed out the history of disagreement between the two men. Sugar reiterated these remarks yesterday evening, admitting that he believed “Livingstone has lost it”.

Originally joining the House of Lords as Gordon Brown’s business tsar, Lord Sugar resigned from the Labour Party after the 2015 election, denouncing the party’s perceived shift to the left in its policies. He found himself disagreeing with Ed Miliband’s “policies on business and enterprise”. He told the Cambridge Union audience that the selection of Ed Miliband over his brother was a mistake and that had David Miliband been selected, Labour “would be in power today”.

While Lord Sugar praised Jeremy Corbyn’s “entrepreneurial" spirit, he highlighted his reservations about the current "return to Old Labour” whereby the “lunatics are back in charge”. He now sits on the independent bench of the House of Lords.

On the subject of the newly-elected Mayor of London, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, Lord Sugar suggested that Khan is being proving to be a “typical politician”. He said that, though Khan was a “great supporter of Corbyn” initially, since the anti-Semitism “thing blew up”, the newly elected Mayor has tried “to divorce himself from the one he endorsed”. Lord Sugar added that he thought it was “pathetic” that Khan, in his first act as Mayor, went to the Holocaust Memorial Ceremony on Sunday, saying that Khan did so “to make a point”, and had made sure he had “cameras following”.

In line with opinion of many business-people and corporations, Lord Sugar advocated for a Remain verdict in the upcoming EU referendum, concluding that while “whatever damage that might have been caused by joining the EU is done, it is better the devil you know”.

He stated that the BBC, which airs the reality game show The Apprentice, which Sugar stars in, is “phenomenal value for money”, coming to its defence after it received critical comments after the BAFTAs. He does not think the government should interfere with the BBC but noted his reservations about its “many levels of management”, which meant that it was “not commercial in that sense”.

When asked of the difference between himself and Donald Trump, after quipping jokingly that it was “the hair”, adding “I see myself as an honest and straight-talking person and I’ll leave it at that”. He went on to say that Trump has “one hell of a rock that he has made for his own back”.

In his concluding remarks, Lord Sugar said that he did not see the same appetite in this generation of “iPhones” and “Nike trainers” as there was in his. Though he admitted that things were far from perfect in the 1960s, he said that then “if you wanted something,” there was a realisation that you should “go and get it yourself”. “In order to have that hunger,” he advised, “you need to be deprived or starved”.

He reminisced that in 1987 he took £100 out of his savings account and started his business “buying and selling stuff”. He pinned the growth of his business on his realism; the ability to recognise when something was not working, consequently leaving that particular business or sector. He commented that the crucial transformation of business most recently has been the considerable shift from one where people “physically made stuff”, to the main commodity nowadays being “lumps of software”.