My light-hearted service of RTing Lord Sugar's football tweets so that people who don't follow him or have any access to a TV or the rest of the internet (apart from Twitter) bore unexpected fruit today and looks like it might provide the greatest journalistic scoop since Watergate. In what some commentators are calling "Arsegate" (because it involved the Arsenal game and not for any other reason) my investigative retweets have caught Sugar in a massive lie, which surely casts doubt on him, his Amstrad products (are they as good as people believed?) and on his hiring/firing policy on the Apprentice. Because if he can lie about his tweets then maybe he doesn't actually fire the worse candidate at all, but just the one he feels makes the worst TV show. I thought it was odd last week when he fired someone who had done nothing wrong and kept in a pair of utter fuckwits, but I trusted his judgement and decided that his huge business brain must have seen something that I missed. But now I know that he is a liar I don't know if I can believe in him any more.
On Saturday he erroneously reported on Twitter that the Arsenal Newcastle game was 1-1 (in fact - and apologies to subscribers to my service it remained 1-0 to Arsenal). If you watched Match of the Day you will have seen that this rumour spread round the ground where the Cocks of Spurs were playing, but had no basis in fact. Clearly Sugar had tweeted that as fact, either just after (or was it just before?) the delusion took hold. He had made a mistake, like the kind of dumbass mistake that his Apprentices make every week and that he is very hard on (especially given that he is expecting them to invent a new business idea in 4 hours that can compete with professionals who have worked in whatever industry for their whole lives). He could have just tweeted, "Sorry, I fucked up, like I did that time with the emailing phone," but instead he went very quiet.
Yesterday, after no doubt being ribbed for an error that thousands of people in the ground also made he tweeted, "@Lord_Sugar Massive roar in crowd at WHL and people said 1-1. No mobile signal in directors box assumed was correct."
I thought that was odd. If he had no mobile signal in the box (and presumably no internet either as he would then have been able to check the web like people did in the days before the Sugar/Herring football service) then how did he send his tweet? It made no sense. Why didn't he just admit that he believed a false rumour and tweeted it immediately? He could then have retracted it when he was shown to be wrong. It would have been odd if he'd heard the news and then said, "No, hold on, I won't tweet that until I've had it verified", unless he was particularly worried about making me look like an idiot when I RTed it.
Obviously I was not the only one to spot this logical flaw in this half-arsed and weak excuse as today Lord Sugar compounded his lie by tweeting, "Truth is crowd at WHL went wild,rumor score was 1-1.No mobile signal in stand.Composed tweet in stand got sent after game." How far is the man prepared to go instead of just saying, "Sorry, got that wrong. What a dick! Lol!" I know for a fact, because I was religiously RTing him that his tweet was sent during the match, whilst the Spurs game was still at 0-0 at what I would estimate was the exact time (just after or just BEFORE) that the rumour spread round the ground. Why is he pretending otherwise? Thank God I RTed all his tweets to prove this and expose the lie. Also he hasn't deleted any of this tweets and the tweet in question is clearly labelled at 17.28. So what gives? Why pretend that it was a tweet that got accidentally sent some time later, when it got sent at the time and when he's saying he would have sent it at the time, but there was no mobile signal. Had he said, "I composed an apologetic tweet the minute I knew the truth BUT my phone failed to send it because of dipping in and out internet coverage" then that would have made sense. But not only was there clearly mobile signal in the box as his (rather sparse) tweets were being sent, but also it was clearly sent at the time.
What's he covering up? Is it really just an attempt to dodge admitting he fucked up? Because if so it doesn't do a great job. He still fucked up, but thought his phone hadn't sent the fuck up. What is going on in his brain? What is he trying to hide? Do you want a proven liar to sully the reputation of parliament by keeping his Lordship?
This is the biggest cover up and most important piece of news at the moment and what he has done here is much worse than the excesses of any other BBC employees (and had made my idea of charging £750 for Sugar's RTs look almost comically ridiculous). I don't know why the papers are ignoring this story, but I will not let it rest until Sugar is stripped of his TV show and his Lordship and all his Amstrad products (and his Twitter account) and is declared a peasant. Don't let him get away with this. Let Arsegate be his Waterloo (he is Napoleon in this and I am the Duke of Wellington).
