Ian Allsop talks tomatoes and why charities should look north for income growth opportunities under the new Conservative government.

Well the general election didn’t turn out as expected did it?

What we have basically learned is that you can’t rely on opinion polls. Or voters. Or voters who respond to opinion polls.

The fact that so many polls were consistently wrong over a long period of time does make me question other statistics we are given.

For example, do people actually have high levels of trust in charities or are they just being untrustworthy when they answer the question?

Constant worrying

But charities still enjoy higher levels of trust than, say, MPs or opinion pollsters. Politicians, in particular, must constantly be worried that some long-forgotten misdemeanour will be dug up one day in a bid to embarrass them.

I spent the election campaign waiting for what the right-wing press would reveal about Ed Miliband. Which in the end amounted to nothing more than he can’t eat bacon sandwiches and once had some girlfriends.

I myself recently had a breakfast-related flashback to something I am not proud of.

I was dining with one of the sector’s leading charity lawyers and had some roasted tomatoes on my plate. I cut into one and was instantly covered in hot tomato flesh, and juice and pips. And in that moment a long-buried memory popped into my mind.

Ten years or so ago I was at an investment management breakfast briefing event at the Savoy. There we sat, trying to digest complex economic powerpoint graphs, while also digesting cooked morning victuals. I speared a tomato. It literally exploded under my fork and went over the sleeve of the impeccably dressed woman sitting next to me – who didn’t notice as she was so engrossed in gross domestic product of a different kind.

What a dilemma: Do I tell her? Pretend it hasn’t happened? Wipe it off? You can guess which option I took and the guilt, long suppressed, still haunts me – a little bit. If she is reading this I can only apologise.

Someone else who will be trying to forget something that may come back to haunt him is Rob Wilson MP.

Last month I mused on his use of Twitter, which he took to a new level in the days immediately after the election. In case you haven’t seen the story, he responded to a constituent’s tweet expressing concerns about the homeless in Reading by calling them a bad loser.

I can only imagine how delighted homelessness charities were when Wilson was reappointed as minister for civil (yes, civil) society days later.

But then David Cameron is no stranger to irony-laden appointments – a justice minister reportedly in favour of hanging; a disabilities minister who voted against protecting disabled children’s benefits, and an anti-gay marriage equalities minister.

What next? Edward the First as minister for Scotland?

But there may be one new opportunity for charities in the shape of the latest new idea from Phillip ‘Big Society’ Blond and his Respublica think tank. Last month we had George Osborne talking up a devolution revolution and his ideas for the ‘Northern powerhouse’. At least I think it was that. It might have been poorhouse, or outhouse.

But what is NP, as I will imaginatively call it?

It was actually first mooted a year ago and is basically, as far as I can tell (by which I mean I Googled it) an attempt to corral the North’s population of 15 million people into a collective force that could begin to rival that of the South East.

Economic imbalance

The hope is to redress the North- South economic imbalance, and to attract investment into northern cities and towns. NP has been described as a “concept, rather than any actual, physical thing at the moment”, so is very much like Big Society.

But enough of that – one man’s regional tokenism is another man’s opportunity. Charities should seriously consider the opportunities NP presents.

Sell your London properties, head up the M6 and follow the northern pound – because increasing demand for your services in the next five years means you will certainly have plenty on which to spend any extra income streams you can develop.

Ian Allsop is a freelance editor and journalist, and regular contributor to Charity Finance.