Ian Allsop muses on the unattractive political career prospects of a charities minister.

Here’s a bit of fun. Let’s start with a trivia question. What do the current Charity Commission chair and chief executive, William Shawcross and Sam Younger, have in common?

Both are sons of government ministers (and lawyers) in Attlee’s post-war government. No doubt this will soon be twisted as more evidence of the regulator’s socialist leanings.

Speaking of trivia, there is a popular quiz show on BBC1, weekdays at 5.15pm, called Pointless.

In it, contestants have to find the most obscure answers they can to questions that have been put to 100 people. So, as a simplistic example, they may be challenged to name countries beginning with ‘C’.

China or Canada would score highly, but Central African Republic would be much lower (and in the context of the game a better answer). The ultimate goal is to get a pointless answer, or one that none of the 100 people thought of.

A pointless question

Try this pointless question. Name any government minister who has had responsibility for the charity sector since 1997. Remember, you are looking for the most obscure one you can.

One would hope that current minister Nick Hurd would score fairly highly – he has been in the role for three years now and has been relatively high-profile and engaging. But some of the others are probably almost forgotten.

I’ll give you until later in the column to see how many you can get, apart from one I am going to mention in the next paragraph so as to take this piece forward.

I suspect the answer which would score second highest to Hurd would be Ed Miliband. Remember him?

It’s hard to imagine it now, but Ed was once the younger brother of the next Labour Prime Minister – but it all got a bit muddled up. So much so that David has now quit as MP and flounced off to a new job heading up the humanitarian organisation International Rescue, in New York.

This constitutes a return to David’s roots as his first job was at NCVO where he was the post boy. Or possibly a political analyst.

But back to the list of politicians. How many did you get? You could have had Alun Michael, Paul Boateng, Angela Eagle and Fiona Mactaggart. All would have scored lowly, as would Paul Goggins.

He was a particular favourite of mine for no other reason than I was able to use the line “in post and ready to deliver” when I interviewed him, referencing the Mrs Goggins character from Postman Pat.

Kevin Brennan (the one who is in a rock band) briefly had the sector brief, as did Lord Filkin (a pointless answer, possibly?).

What about Angela Smith who was the charities minister at the fagend of the Brown administration? All I can remember about her is she didn’t want to go to an event at London Zoo because of her views about animals in captivity.

The only other one I can recall is the chap who took over when Ed started his meteoric rise to becoming head of a so-far-ineffective opposition. Phil Hope. I got into trouble with his private office once over a line I wrote about charities expressing a lack of “hope” in his abilities, which may have been guilty of being a weak pun but was hardly the worst thing a journalist has ever written about a politician.

I received a stern phone call telling me off, in which the person tried to make the point that “you haven’t even met him so you aren’t in a position to judge him. He’s actually really nice”.

Aside from the fact that the warmth of someone’s personality is not necessarily relevant to how good they are at their job, this implied that I couldn’t make judgements on anyone I hadn’t met.

Stepping stone to nowhere

So what does all this demonstrate? That the charity ministerial job is a stepping stone for practically nothing, except in the case of our next PM by default.

So where will Nick Hurd end up? Is his length of tenure a sign of his steady effectiveness? Or that, despite being in a cabinet that has repeatedly showed its flaws, he still isn’t regarded highly enough to take on a bigger role?

Because I have already discounted the other option; that Cameron really rates him and, as such, only wants him working with the sector he values so very much.

We have all seen evidence that this isn’t really the case, beyond paying lip service to the sector and asking it to pick up the pieces of the carnage created elsewhere.

Charities are not quite regarded as pointless, but the impression increases that they are becoming a mere triviality in terms of serious government commitment.