New charities minister Brooks Newmark has not made himself popular in the sector with his opening comments. David Ainsworth asks whether he will prove as bad a minister as many fear.

Brooks Newmark has not exactly had an auspicious start to his ministerial career. His comments yesterday that charities should “stick to their knitting” and “stay out of the realm of politics” were extremely ill-advised for a charities minister. The reaction from the sector has been bemused, outraged and furious.

Charities are fed up with being told by Tory politicians that they should stick to helping poor people, and stop asking why they’re poor. And they’re really fed up with the idea that politicians feel charities shouldn’t be allowed to tell them what to do, while those same politicians feel they have every right to tell charities what to do.

There’s a perception that an elitist, out-of-touch minority in Whitehall feel they can lecture those who fight on behalf of the disadvantaged. Charities feel patronised, sidelined and dismissed by a bunch of posh boys who don’t know the price of a pint of milk.

It’s bad enough to hear that sentiment from right-wingers like Chris Grayling and Charlie Elphicke. But to hear it from the minister for civil society, who is meant to be charities’ voice in government, was more than most people could take, and has provoked an enormous collective howl of protest, on Twitter and on our website.

Nor has he exactly rushed to clarify or correct what he’s said. We’ve had a one-sentence response on Twitter, and a statement which we had to request from his press officers which said the same thing. This suggests a bit of a naïve disregard for the sector’s concerns.

Nonetheless, let’s pause a second. Did Newmark even mean what he said? It may be possible his words don’t reflect his true position, and he may actually be more on charities’ side than his initial words suggest.

Sir Stephen Bubb, a man who’s fought bitterly for decades against any attempt to shut him up, held a long meeting with Newmark yesterday, and published a blog this morning supporting him, saying that the minister actually supported charities’ right to campaign.

His predecessor, Nick Hurd, was also full of praise for him as man who understood the sector. And Hurd at least was a minister who understood campaigning.

Then there’s the fact that Newmark himself, while he didn’t put out the fullest statement yesterday, did soften his original position, saying that “charities absolutely have the right to campaign but should stay out of the realm of 'party' politics”.

That’s a bit of an improvement, and Newmark has promised to outline his real thoughts in more detail in due course.

The trouble is, his statement about campaigning and party politics still leaves a lot of room to cover.

Increasingly, the Tory party has used the phrase “party political” to mean “anything which could be seen as criticising a political party” instead of its original meaning – “anything intended to support a political party”. So staying out of party politics could effectively leave you unable to say very much at all.

We still don’t know exactly what Newmark really thinks. Does he really think charities should be allowed to campaign, or only on certain, carefully-selected issues which his party doesn’t mind too much? What does he think “party politics” means?

Because a genuine charity, genuinely motivated by its beneficiaries, shouldn’t be 'allowed' to say anything. It should have the right to say anything it wants, and not need the permission of the powers that be to do so.

With campaigning law, it shouldn’t be where you end up that matters. It’s where you start from. If you start with your beneficiaries in mind, you should be able to say more or less what you want. It’s only if all your board is composed of politicians, or you arrange events and speakers with only one party in attendance, or you do nothing but write screeds supporting one point of view, that you are party political.

(Ironically, the most party political charity of recent years was one supporting the Tories – Atlantic Bridge. But that’s a tale for another day.)

Newmark’s problem is that he hasn’t said or done anything much since he came into office. He’s not given any media interviews, or published anything about his intentions. It’s very hard to get a sense of what he’s really like.

So it’s very hard to know exactly how worried the sector should be by his comments. There’s still a possibility he might prove as good as Bubb’s word. Or he could prove very out of touch indeed.