A special bonus edition of Society Diary to mark the departure of NCVO chair Martyn Lewis. Don't say we're not good to you.
The great and good of the voluntary sector turned out in force last night at NCVO’s HQ in King’s Cross to bid farewell to the umbrella body’s departing chair of six years Sir Martyn Lewis, and welcome his successor Peter Kellner.
NCVO president Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson set the scene. “The first time I met Martin,” she told the room, “I tried really hard not to be all giggly at meeting that guy off the telly.”
It just goes to show that it doesn’t matter if you’re one of the country’s most decorated Paralympians, and a baroness. You can still get excited at meeting someone off the telly. Imagine if it had been someone really famous, like that bloke off Pointless.
Lewis took to the stage to pay tribute to the good folk about NCVO, and decided it was best to first get stuck into a joke about a parrot. It wasn’t Diary’s favourite joke about parrots, which is “What’s orange and sounds like a parrot?” (A: a carrot) but it was quite a good one, albeit too long for this space. Diary, in the spirit of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, has repeated it below in a footnote.
With that out of the way, Lewis got stuck into paying tribute to Sir Stuart Etherington, the chief executive of NCVO. “I’m just the latest chairman to be seen off by Stuart,” he told the room, quite accurately.
This is fair comment. Etherington was appointed to his current job sometime around the reign of Ethelred the Unready. Unsubstantiated rumours suggest it was so long ago that he still had hair. While he is not naturally the retiring type – in any sense of the word – he has promised faithfully that Kellner will be the man to see him go.
Then Lewis got really serious, paying tribute to NCVO’s chief executive, trustee board and staff, who between them, he said, had cemented NCVO’s reputation for coming up with “proper, sensible, considered judgements” on issues.
It was hard to know who he was comparing them with. Or at least it would have been, had he not taken the opportunity of his last public appearance, less than a fortnight ago, to lay into chief executives body Acevo for refusing to merge with NCVO. The ill-feeling between the two bodies is hardly a secret, and Lewis has implied NCVO should just set up its own rival in an attempt to put Acevo out of business.
So it wasn’t exactly surprising that literally no one from Acevo was there to hear his speech, even though it was taking place in the office building where they work. Had they not been invited, or were they all washing their hair? Diary has no idea.
Finally Lewis confessed that his wife Patsy has challenged him on why he does so much work for charity when he could be out there earning “real money”.
In response, he fired into a heartfelt, almost evangelical, tribute to the sector, saying that he did it because it’s “so deeply satisfying”. He ventured that the national media, who are losing readers hand over fist, and politicians, who score even lower than charities on the public trust scale, are missing a trick by failing to engage with the 15 million citizens who volunteer each month.
He finished by exhorting the assembled guests to “continue to dare greatly”, because “it is your achievements that make our country great, and you could argue that they are the only thing that actually does”. Diary, itself so well-versed in making a positive difference every day, was left with a tear in its eye.
Etherington, for his part, paid tribute to Lewis’ enthusiasm. One gets the impression he could have managed with a slightly less enthusiastic chair. One gets that impression because he said so.
Lewis, he said, had the habit of ringing up with ideas he had encountered and thought that NCVO should do. "One a month would have been nice," he said.
Nonetheless it it was Lewis’ successor, the journalist and political commentator Peter Kellner, who stole the show.
Kellner ambled to the stage with the air of a chemistry professor about him, and proceeded to lay out his own scientific hypothesis about public trust in charity: that the sector was either like a sausage, or a space rocket.
Bear with us on this. Kellner’s central point was that the public have no idea how charity really works. (And perhaps, by extension, that no one working in a charity has had much interest in letting them know, so long as they keep ponying up the cash.) This state of affairs could politely be described as sub-optimal, and Kellner has demanded we build a better understanding of our sector.
But this brings with it its own risks, he said. “If people really understand what goes on, are we a sausage or a space rocket?
“People who understand how space rockets work are usually enthused by space travel. But those who understand how sausages are made are often put off ever eating one again.
“So we need to make sure that when we enhance public understanding of the sector, the public think of us as a space rocket and not a sausage.”
A parrot joke, as told by Martyn Lewis
A bloke walks into a pet shop. He wants to buy a parrot and there are three parrots for sale in the shop. He asks the shop owner how much the first parrot costs.
Shop owner: That’s ten thousand pounds.
Bloke: Ten thousand pounds? How could a parrot possibly be worth ten thousand pounds?
Shop owner: It’s got a first-class degree from Oxford, that parrot.
Bloke: So how much is this second parrot?
Shop owner: This one’s twenty thousand.
Bloke: Twenty thousand pounds? Why on earth is it worth twenty thousand pounds?
Shop owner: It’s got a first-class degree from Cambridge and an MBA from Harvard Business School. That’s a really smart parrot.
Bloke: Well how much is the third parrot?
Shop owner: This one’s thirty thousand pounds.
Bloke: THIRTY THOUSAND POUNDS!? What qualities and qualifications could it possibly possess to be worth thirty thousand pounds?
Shop owner: Oh, this one’s got no qualifications at all, sir. But the other two call it chairman.
