Fired The Apprentice star Max England has hit back at Lord Sugar and his BBC teammates with a defiant five-word response. 

The senior account manager, 30 – who is founder of MaxPadel – failed to impress Lord Sugar on Thursday after leading team Parallel in the live shopping channel task.

Each team were tasked with picking items and selling them on one of the country’s leading shopping channels, but unfortunately Max’s team lost after making £1305.68, while Liam Snellin’s team Ascendency made £1529.63. 

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline about his departure, Max said: ‘I’m proud of my efforts on the task.’ 

He continued: ‘I made the best decisions with the information I had at the time, and I can be proud of that.

‘And unfortunately, on this occasion, it wasn’t enough. 

‘I would have loved for it [to stay in the competition], but, yeah, I can leave my head held high, and I left everything out there. ‘ 

Former tennis player Max, who hails from Surrey, decided to bring Dean Franklin and Chisola Chitambala back into the boardroom, which meant that Amber-Rose Badrudin was free to head home to the house.

But he thinks that anyone of the team could have been sent home. 

Max said: ‘If I’m honest, there was probably a reason or a justification to have fired any one of the four of us really.

‘You’ve got Amber Rose – she was saying in the boardroom that we weren’t giving her enough direction. But you saw it with the face steamer.

‘Chisola, I put her in charge of securing the best style product, which was the air fryer, and she didn’t manage to do that.

‘And Dean, you know, is wheeler dealer Dean, I put him with me so that we could choose collectively the best product. So he was equally responsible for that. 

‘But look, when you put yourself as project manager, you know you’re sticking your neck out. 

‘You know you’re putting yourself in the firing line. 

‘And you know, as I said in the boardroom, I think you have to, as a leader, accept responsibility for the collective right, and that’s absolutely what I did.’ 

When asked if he wasn’t the project manager, did he think the outcome would have been different, he told us: ‘It’s tricky isn’t it? With with hindsight.

‘I think what I’d say is that I was the right person to project manage this task, and I’m really pleased that I did, and I’m pleased that I was voted in to do so, my I do have experience working in a gallery, albeit with live sport.

‘The decisions we made It was the right thing to do, I think to play devil’s advocate. 

‘If I hadn’t put myself forward as project manager, and we had lost the task, there’s a good reason to be like, “why isn’t this guy project manager? He’s worked in live streaming before.”

‘So again, it’s all conjecture at the moment, but think one of the things that, for me, was the most challenging from the task was, in the morning, you leave the morning briefing, and pick two categories, a beauty category, and the outdoor category. 

‘And the outdoor category is obviously what led us to having a picnic blanket and a kayak, sub optimal product, which absolutely is the case. 

‘But in the morning, we haven’t seen the products, right? 

‘So when I picked outdoors, in my mind, it was, let’s get a really nice, high value item, like a lawn mower or a barbecue. 

‘The timings where the summer’s coming up, like that would do really well and would have done well, I would say, but didn’t. 

‘And we were in a situation where our best option was the kayak, unfortunately. It wasn’t ideal. We almost got it over the line, even with suboptimal products. 

‘But absolutely that has that sits with myself and Dean and as project manager, probably does put me more in the spotlight than Dean. It is what it is.’

During Thursday’s episode, Lord Sugar told the businessman: ‘Max hasn’t impressed me very much.

‘Max made quite a lot of mistakes, picking the wrong things, picking things that he liked… 

‘Max I’m going to hold you accountable and responsible for the failure of this task. 

‘It is regretful, but you’re fired.’ 

Despite losing out on a business partnership with Lord Sugar, Max’s business is thriving. 

His business plan was to go on the show and build a premium indoor paddle centre after becoming the fastest growing sport in the world.   

Max told us: ‘My plan is still absolutely to build a premium paddle center and hopefully multiple off the back of that. 

‘It just isn’t going to build with Lord sugar on this occasion. 

‘You know, that is very much my focus. In the meantime, I’m also selling my own line and my own brand of paddle rackets, which are flying!

‘So one of the good things from the show is I’m out of stock at the moment on quite a number of the lines, because the uptake has been fantastic. 

‘So everything in the paddle space like that is absolutely where I’m diverting my attention. 

‘I think one of the kind of secondary pros of being on the show is helping to bring paddling to the mainstream in the UK. There are still an awful lot of people that don’t know what paddle is.’

The Apprentice airs on BBC One.