Lord Alan Sugar has shown off a paperweight of Piers Morgan in a compromising position with Donald Trump.

Piers Morgan, a personal friend of Donald Trump, was widely mocked last month over an interview with the leader in which he repeatedly lavished praise on Trump while failing to significantly challenge any of the administration’s policies.

The ITV host then accused rival network the BBC of “homophobia”, after comedy show The Mash Report produced a cartoon of Morgan with his nose up Donald Trump’s backside – an apparent reference to the term “brown-nosing”.

Morgan claimed it was “a homophobic cartoon”, insisting: “It portrays two straight men in a homosexual act, so yes, it’s homophobic.”

But apparently Apprentice boss Lord Sugar doesn’t think so.

The businessman and BBC TV personality took to Twitter to reveal he now has a paperweight of the cartoon.

He tweeted: “This paper wieght [sic] will take pole position on my desk.”

Some on the platform accused Sugar of perpetuating homophobic tropes by latching onto the joke.

Mash Report host Nish Kumar previously responded to Morgan’s outrage about the cartoon, calling his homophobia allegations “weirdly patronising”.

He said: “[Piers] responded to the BBC Two tweet with a slightly passive-aggressive thing, and then at some point later in the day decided he had had enough, and started tweeting about the thing, and then he started tweeting the image itself.

“Obviously it’s an incredibly crude joke, no doubt about it, it’s not high-minded, but it’s in a context.

“What Rachel [Parris, who hosted the segment] does is get away with some really nasty stuff because she is this smiling assassin. In the context of the clip you have Frost/Nixon and then the contrast, and it’s on screen for a split-second, you get the laugh and you’re out.

“What he was hoping to do by taking it out of context, he tried to make it look worse than it is. It then blew up in his face, because everyone just went, ‘it’s really funny!’.

“As various people who work on this show and friends of ours who are gay pointed out, that is in itself an incredibly homophobic allegation. That is not a homophobic act, and assuming it is is at best weirdly patronising.”

Kumar added: “I’ve had dealings with Piers within the calendar year, so when we were writing the piece, Rachel said, I wonder if he’s going to respond to it.

“I said, he probably will, but I suspect he won’t make a big deal out of it – showing once again, my profound lack of understanding of the inner workings of the Morgan brain.”

Morgan has become known for his on-air rants about transgender and non-binary people on ITV daytime show Good Morning Britain.