Our weekly round-up of outlandish and interesting information collected from the corners of the charity sector.
Chief whip takes the lead
So where is Michael Gove? That’s the question echoing around Westminster for quite a while now, after he got stuck in the toilets on the first day in the job of chief whip. And this time it was the turn of Kevin Brennan, the shadow education minister, to put the boot in.
Gove, it seems, came second in the Westminster Dog of the Year contest yesterday, together with his Bichon Frise puppy, Snowy. The competition is jointly organised by the Dogs Trust and the Kennel Club.
Brennan, debating in the chamber at the time, launched the outrageous accusation that Gove didn’t have much to do. Despite being a former charities minister himself, Brennan suggested that taking part in this important charitable endeavour might be a waste of time.
Diary is mystified by another thing, though. What exactly are the criteria for winning a Parliamentary dog of the year contest? Back-biting? Marking out your territory? Swallowing anything you’re fed?
On a technical note, the picture we've used is not actually of Michael Gove's dog, which for copyright reasons cannot be reproduced here. It's another Bichon Frise that looks like his dog. But what do you care? It's a cute dog, and they all basically look the same.
What’s that? She’s not allowed to drive a tank
From dogs we move onto foxes. Specifically, the lovely ladies of Hot Shots Calendar, who recently took part in a shoot to raise money for Help for Heroes, on a Utah National Guard base. The shoot followed the traditional format, mostly - girls in tiny bikinis draping themselves over big, manly things like machine guns.
Only one snag. All that gear belongs to the US government and it seems the ladies weren’t actually given permission by, well, anyone really, to drive around in tanks and fire heavy artillery. You can see where the government might get upset about that.
Anyway, how did this all come about? How did a collection of large-breasted ladies wearing few clothes gain entrance to a large installation full of thousands of testosterone-fuelled gentlemen?
Hard to imagine, really.
Two breast implants, slightly used
From skimpily-clad ladies we move onto, well, more skimpily-clad ladies. This time it’s Katie Price, who’s announced that she’s having another boob job, her seventh, and selling the old implants for charity.
“I can even sign them with a marker pen,” she offered.
Opinion is divided about the offer. Is it generous? Or just a bit grim?
But Katie Price always divides opinion. She’s got ample support, but then, she’s also got her knockers.
We need a glossy report about social investment
You’d think that producing glossy reports about social investment would be a niche industry, to be honest. But you’d be wrong. There are gazillions of them. Just search for social investment report on this website and you’ll soon discover that you’re tripping over the buggers. There are actually more reports about social investment than there are social investors. And that’s a scientific fact.*
But there was one question which had heretofore not drifted through the transom of Diary’s mind. How to generate the banal images which every single report on social investment inevitably contains.
Step forward Dan Gregory, who can probably now retire after producing his comic masterwork, Money does grow on trees, a 2,500-word report on the fact that people who write other reports are wasting a lot of time. Diary might take him to task for calling the kettle black, to be honest. But on the other hand, it is quite funny.
*Alternatively, Diary might just have made it up.
Or maybe about social elephantment
Diary will be producing its own sententious plod through the issues facing social investment in due course, opining that charities are not taking on social investment because they’re not “investment ready”, rather than because a) they just don’t want to or b) they can get people to give them money for free.
It will major on the fact that the environment is not right for this revolutionary new industry, and call for more support from everyone from the government to the Financial Conduct Authority to Ganesh the elephant-headed god of the Hindus. It’ll be called something like Pachyderming a Punch.
It will not, at any stage, reference the fact that between Big Society Capital, Futurebuilders, Capacitybuilders, Communitybuilders, the Social Enterprise Investment Fund, social impact bonds, and a whole bunch of other stuff, government has already committed the best part of a billion quid to growing social investment, which probably ought to do, thanks.
Nor will it at any stage suggest that people who are interested in social investment are quietly getting on with it, a bit more slowly than they hoped, and that, well, ta awfully and so on, but they probably don’t desperately need another report with eight key recommendations telling them all what to do.
