So the grumpy £830m juggernaut that is Sir Alan Sugar goes rumbling into the fourth series of his ball-breaking show The Apprentice. And once again, as well as being a show-case for some of the most ambitious people in the country, it is serving as a platform for the Amstrad and Viglen chairman’s trenchant views on business.

Last week the target was women in the workplace. Top of Sugar’s grumble list is the fact that working women may actually have babies and may occasionally need maternity leave. “People are entitled to have too much. Everything has gone too far,” he says.

Furthermore Sugar – who once signed a birthday card to Ann, his wife of 40 years, with the words: “from Alan Sugar”– is rather cheesed off that it is now illegal to quiz potential female employees about their breeding ambitions.

“It’s got to such a state now that you can’t ask the obvious questions,” he moans. On the other hand he seems rather in awe of stiletto-heeled ladies in the boardroom. “Be under no illusion. There are women employers who are more ruthless than men.”

Really? To test what it’s like working under Sugar, I ask two women with expert knowledge: Katie Hopkins, who got to the semi-finals of last year’s show and then resigned; and Michelle Dewberry, who won The Apprentice in 2006, got the prize – a job with Sugar’s firm – but then left after less than 12 months.

“Well,” says Hopkins, 33, who now has a burgeoning media career, “if you were choosing between male and female candidates for a job, and they were equally matched, you would pick the male because of maternity leave. Women of childbearing age are a liability, especially for medium-scale employers. Pregnant women are a litigious timebomb.”

Blimey, Katie. That’s a bit steep, surely?

“I am a woman and I know the cunning of my own kind,” responds Hopkins coolly. “I have been party to a whole host of conversations where pregnant friends say: ‘I’ll go back for two weeks and then hand in my notice’. They know what they are doing, and they play the game.”

That’s not all. Apparently women are likely to drag their feet even when they come back from maternity leave. According to Hopkins, this is particularly rife in the caring sector.

“I come from the school where women organise childcare properly, but there are a number of examples where working women end up letting down the side. That’s why you see an enormous number of mothers working in human resources or the public sector. These are lax places where you can hide away, underperform and still get your pay cheque.”

But didn’t Hopkins herself “let down the side” somewhat? Having achieved her 15 minutes of fame, she abruptly withdrew from the show, citing as her reason the care of her two young children.

“I gave [Sugar] my honest reaction, which was that I wouldn’t get my childcare organised in time to be in Brentwood [Sugar’s Amstrad headquarters] with him in a week.”

Wasn’t she behaving just as he fears women always do when they have to choose between family and work commitments?

Hopkins doesn’t see it that way. “Viewers probably don’t realise that we didn’t have access to phones, and I couldn’t check that my nanny would be available [if I won]. I’m a single mother and rely on my nanny. Reality shows hide details like that.”

Whatever the reason, the exposure meant Hopkins was prime reality TV fodder; soon afterwards she landed a berth on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! (by which time she presumably had the necessary childcare arrangements in place). Indeed, she now claims to spend 50% of her working week in media jobs (for the other half she does business consulting).

And she’s clearly a fan of the old grump. “Sir Alan is old-school, but I like his simplistic way of being. Quite a lot of what he says is very true. I’d choose a man to work for me over a woman of childbearing age. And I think, as bosses, women are much more ruthless than men because they’ve had to fight to get there.”

Does that mean she is ruthless? “Well, the chubby-mummy brigade call me ruthless. [By that] I mean the sort of woman who thinks driving a Volvo is exciting or who gets excited by a trip to the supermarket. I think that’s just jealousy. They’ve opted for an easier way of life and don’t want to see success in a woman. If I were a man, they’d call me a high-achiever.”

All good fighting talk but utterly outdated, according to the petite but steely Dewberry. Now 28 the 2006 Apprentice winner thinks such beliefs about women in power are old hat.

“I don’t believe in this whole gender-split discussion,” she says.

“People are people. I don’t get intimidated by people and I don’t intimidate others.” Dewberry, who now runs her own consulting company, says that before her stint with Sugar she worked for plenty of women who were anything but ruthless.

“My last four bosses were all female, and I have nothing but respect for the women I’ve worked for. My last boss, Mary Turner, is the CEO of Tiscali [the internet service provider]. She has children and she is incredibly successful.”

It’s not hard to see why Sugar was impressed by Dewberry, a former shelf stacker from Hull who had a brutal upbringing at the hands of an alcoholic father. Yet she articulates a clear vision of modern management aims that go completely against Sugar’s.

“Alan’s style is nononsense whereas I believe in soft management, with a good work-life balance,” she says. “Alan is very old-fashioned in his management style. Despite being pioneering with technology, he’s not [interested in] flexible and remote working.

“Prior to The Apprentice I was working as a consultant. I was led by targets. No one ever ordered me to sit in an office from nine to five. You don’t manage people by the amount of time they sit in the office.”

Although her period in Sugar’s empire was marked by the revelation she was pregnant by fellow contestant Syed Ahmed (she subsequently suffered a miscarriage), Dewberry is quite clear about her views on mothers in the workplace. Children, she says, don’t come into the equation. And old-fashioned managers should wake up to this.

“It’s not just Alan Sugar – there is this male mentality, which is that when they interview a lady, they look at her as a baby-making machine. That’s an incredibly wrong way of approaching the employment of anyone. When someone walks into an interview, first and foremost they are there because of their skills and talents. Modern-day managers need to be looking at people for the value they bring to the organisations.”

So is Sugar wrong to moan about not being able to ask women questions relating to their personal circum-stances?

Dewberry snorts. “If you ask people what their views are on pregnancy, how far will you take it? Will you ask them about their menstrual cycle? Will you ask them about period pain? Or whether they have endome-triosis? Where do you draw the line? Women didn’t choose to be the gender that carries babies and we shouldn’t be penalised.”

Is Sugar a silly, sexist chap, then? “To say he’s sexist is not right – otherwise how could he have ended up with two women at the finals,” she observes. “I think Alan just needs to advance his management style a little and realise that you can get a whole lot more from people if you develop flexibility in the way you treat them.”

Whereas Hopkins has been glued to the new series of The Apprentice, Dewberry is perfectly happy to leave the past behind. “No, I haven’t been watching it, I’ve been out working. I think Alan would approve of that.”

Sugar on women

Women working together can sometimes be very difficult with each other: they can have lots of backbiting and jockeying for position

If someone comes into an interview and you think to yourself there’s a possibility that this woman might have a child and therefore take time off, it is a bit of a psychological negative thought

The woman employer is far more ruthless than the man. A woman employer is sitting there thinking, hmm, is she going to get married? Is she going to have kids? They’re worse than the men. Mercenary

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