The Apprentice candidate who turned down the chance to take a £100,000 job with Sir Alan Sugar last week has been fired from her real-life job.

Katie Hopkins, 31, quit the high-rating BBC One programme after Sir Alan offered her a place in the show’s final, to return to her job at the Met Office.

A spokesman for the Met Office said Hopkins was told yesterday that she had not met the standards required of an employee during her probation period.

“She didn’t make it through her probation period. All civil servants have a probation period and Katie failed to pass those reviews.”

Asked whether Hopkins’s appearance on The Apprentice had led to her dismissal, the spokesman said: “My comment would be to run through a few aspects of probation - attendance, time-keeping and conduct.”

The management consultant joined the Met Office, in Exeter, in autumn 2006 but soon after accepted a place on The Apprentice and was on air with the show by March 2007.

The fiery mother-of-two’s refusal of a place in The Apprentice final made headlines last week.

The first candidate to have ever voluntarily left the show, Hopkins told a furious Sir Alan she could not go through to the final as winning The Apprentice would mean moving her children and uprooting her life.

Accused of only having gone on the show for publicity, Hopkins said: “I set out to win The Apprentice, that's the bottom line. It was just that moment in the boardroom - that bam when Sir Alan said, 'you've got your place' that I gulped and realised that I'd have to move my whole world to Brentwood next week. If you look at the footage and look at me sitting there struggling with the decision, you see the truth. The reality hit. There were two people that desperately wanted a place in the final and I felt it was the right and more honourable thing to step down.”

Although her departure was dramatic, Hopkins grabbed headlines almost as soon as the show went to air.

She flirted with Sir Alan in the boardroom as well as fellow contestant Paul Callaghan.

She also boasted in front of the cameras that she had lied and cheated to "get someone else's husband because I wanted him" and last week pictures of her cavorting naked in a cornfield with a colleague from the Met Office were splashed across the tabloids.

Ruthless in her approach, Hopkins became known for her duplicitous nature and departing Apprentice candidates regularly expressed their dismay at her behaviour.

While being fired from the Met Office will no doubt come as a blow, Hopkins has a financial cushion to fall back on. Since leaving the show she has received £65,000 in newspaper and magazine fees for her story and has received further media offers.

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