International Trade Secretary Liz Truss’s department has been accused of wasting £760,000 on a “vanity project” to open a swish headquarters for trade talks in the skyscraper shown in Lord Sugar’s The Apprentice.
Financial records at the Department for International Trade reveal the sum was blown on weighing up two prestige sites in central London as homes for a dedicated “trade negotiation facility”.
One of the sites was One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, best known to the public from exterior shots suggesting - misleadingly - that it is home to the boardroom where Lord Sugar fires the reality show’s unlucky competitors.
The other was One Drummond Gate, Pimlico, which was HQ to the Office for National Statistics before it was relocated to Newport, Wales, in 2006.
In February, the department reported it was handing back to the Treasury some £5.6 million of allocations for the project that had gone unspent because of the delays to Brexit.
Then, in July, the DIT was obliged to disclose a “reportable loss” of £760,000 spent on due diligence at the two sites earmarked for the project.
DIT accounts recorded that one of the sites was taken off the market, meaning money spent on it was wasted, while the other was deemed “to offer poor value for money” and rejected.
The locations were revealed by parliamentary questions from shadow trade secretary Emily Thornberry.
She said: “This is all wrong. First, why is the government spending millions on a new facility when they’ve got plenty of negotiating venues at their disposal already.
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"Second, why are they wasting hundreds of thousands exploring options that even Alan Sugar only pretends to use.”
Lord Sugar’s confrontations take place in reality at a studio in west London, although an image of One Canada Square is shown before each boardroom scene.
Ms Thornberry said a regional city needed the extra investment more.
One veteran Whitehall watcher commented: “It’s priceless to imagine Boris or Liz Truss imagining themselves negotiating with the Americans and Japanese over Sir Alan’s boardroom table. Talk about vanity projects.”
A DIT spokesman said: “We are exploring how a dedicated facility might support the UK’s role as an independent trading nation, however, no decisions have been made.”