Ian Allsop ponders the meaning of rising stars, fading stars and no stars.

I come to writing my column this month fresh from compiling our feature on ‘25 stars under 35’ – out this month. What I can bring you here, exclusively, is some more detailed analysis of the information.

Name your star

This allows me to reveal that almost a third of the bright young things providing advisory services to charities are called Emma, Hannah or Elizabeth. Even the blokes. It’s something to consider if you are planning children and have specific career aspirations for them.

While I have long ceased considering myself a rising star – I am now more like Betelgeuse after a big night out (an astronomy joke for you there) – one of the charity sector’s esteemed alumni is all over the media as he seeks to become Prime Minister later this month.

I wonder if the current holder of Ed Miliband’s former job, Rob Wilson, will be regarded in the same light as he comes to what may be the end of his short career in charity land?

I commented last month about how Wilson had expressed a view on some nonsense or other emanating from Eric Pickles, while blithely admitting he hadn’t actually read it. No doubt he has been too busy for reading (or Reading, where he is seeking re-election as an MP) as he does seem to have a lot on his plate, after becoming embroiled in a row over some pretty sensational claims.

No, not the (serious) ones about the chief constable of Thames Valley Police warning him off raising complaints in Parliament about errors allegedly made by the force in a child abuse case in 2008. They could actually be true, or at least grounded in reality.

Unlike his astonishing assertion that the Big Society – which like a 1970s pop star seems to be attempting an ill-judged comeback – has succeeded. Wilson said that people are talking about BS as if it has been some kind of failure. “Actually, we have a bigger, stronger society today than when we came to power,” he claimed.

In some ways he is right. Something that only ever really existed as a shiny conceit can hardly be said to have failed. “I’m sorry that people seem to think that we live in this miserable country with all these miserable public services and all these miserable communities,” he then moaned miserably.

The other thing Wilson seems to have been busy with is tweeting. Now, any social-media savvy politician worth his office expenses has an online presence. Most MPs use Twitter to engage in debate. Or petty arguments. Or to tweet platitudes like: “Enjoyed my day visiting such-and-such local business”, when we all know they were bored to tears and only did it as a constituency obligation.

But Wilson also seems to spend a lot of time forwarding anti-Labour messages, or biased articles about Tory policy. I would say half of his tweets fall into this category. Well, it may not be 50 per cent – I haven’t actually bothered to spend time reading them all – but then in Wilson’s world that doesn’t stop me expressing an opinion as fact.

All of which illustrates the power of the internet in what I am going to start calling our increasingly online, review culture. I talked about 25 stars earlier, but sometimes the most powerful and misleading determinant of success (or failure) is just one star.

While the net has enabled people to give their views, and glean useful information on all sorts of things, the unchecked nature of this can be dangerous. I am talking about things like TripAdvisor.

The one-star review

A hotel can have 86 positive reviews but it is the single one-star review that you remember, and which affects your judgement – and it is often for something completely irrelevant like the kettle being a funny colour.

On Amazon you get lots of onestar reviews, but when you read some of them you realise they aren’t actually reviewing the product but the fact that the postman delivered it late. Which seems terribly unreasonable.

So in my last piece before this year’s first general election, how would the government fare in my TripAdvisor-style review? Here’s my answer: no stars – did not deliver .

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