In an interview with the Today programme yesterday morning Lord Hodgson explained how he sees the process of voluntary sector deregulation.

“It’s like getting barnacles off a ship,” he said. “Each barnacle is tiny but each time you remove a barnacle, the ship goes a bit faster.”

There’s no arguing with that. But a few hours later, at the official launch of Lord Hodgson’s Charities Act review, the minister for civil society shared an interesting anecdote as to how the good Lord arrived at his metaphor.

To a room that included the chief executives of NCVO, Acevo, Institute of Fundraising, Navca and others, Nick Hurd said: “I was amused to hear that your barnacle analogy started life with the expression ‘of course this is the sector with a lot of knobs on it, or in it’, which may be true…but now I see the analogy has evolved to barnacles.”

Lord Hodgson did not comment on the truthfulness of Hurd’s story – but the audience took it in good humour nonetheless.