The Daily Star, and its sister paper the Daily Express, haven't been keen on The Apprentice or Sir Alan for a while.
When challenged to be more specific about who this comment was aimed at, at a preview screening for The Apprentice last week, Sir Alan growled jokingly: "Peter Moore is not here".
Feeling betrayed by their universities and their lecturers, some final-year students may now be wondering whether they should have applied instead to be apprentices of Sir Alan Sugar, an entrepreneur who thinks degrees stunt creativity and prefers to employ bright school-leavers.
I love a challenge and if I were on The Apprentice I think Sir Alan would like me as long as I could stop laughing.
The real issue for me about the last episode of The Apprentice is that Sir Alan did not fire Lee on the spot.
Sir Alan Sugar, the businessman and Apprentice star, was offered a peerage and a new enterprise role in government while Glenys Kinnock, the former MEP and wife of former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, was appointed Europe minister.
The government and the BBC could so easily have done worse; Lord Sugar got the Apprentice gig only after Sir Philip Green turned it down – presumably because it would play havoc with his wife's tax exile arrangements in Monaco.
Meanwhile, his fellow apprentice, the tax-avoider Sir Philip Green has been praised for completing an ill-written summary of Lord Gershon's 2005 efficiency review, a project which had to be marked down after he did not show his workings.
An atmosphere of strangeness will pervade the final of The Apprentice – not only will Sir Alan now become Lord Alan after his ennobling by Gordon Brown today – but the final it is screening this Sunday!
At 13, already a talented draughtsman, Hooke went to London, initially as apprentice to the painter Sir Peter Lely, but soon as a pupil at Westminster school under Dr Busby, who accepted special pupils to train as virtuoso technical assistants.
