Our weekly round-up of interesting and outlandish information, collected from the corners of the charity sector.
There’s a real buzz at the conference this year
So there were a fair few WTF moments at the party conferences over the last couple of weeks, but probably none more so than this enormous charity mosquito, which drifted through the vision of our intrepid reporter earlier this week.
Our scribe, a trifle sleep-deprived after burning the midnight oil filing the best and comprehensive coverage of the charity sector at the conference, wasn’t really ready for a human-sized insect, especially one sporting a giant proboscis.
(Diary would like to inform you, in what can only be described as a massive aside, that this column is improbably partial to the word proboscis. It’s definitely on the list of Diary’s top ten favourite words, along with borborygmus, which means a tummy rumble, and sesquipedalianism, which means the tendency to use unnecessarily long and complicated words.)
The mosquito was with Malaria no More, apparently, and was campaigning for its species to be rid of the malaria parasite, so it could go back to biting people in peace.
At least, that’s one way of looking at. Diary suspects there are those in the sector who think that the presence of a bunch of poisonous insects and bloodsuckers at a party conference is nothing unusual.
Happy Birthday Bob
So Bob Geldof turned up at the Tory conference on Monday, which was a bit of a surprise. He was a last-minute speaker at an event launching a new campaign from the One Campaign, and most of the Tory audience seemed to be pretty bemused by his presence inside the secure zone. Diary suspects they’d have been less surprised to find him outside with the protesters calling them ‘Tory scum’.
They got steadily more baffled when he praised Justine Greening for her work getting the Millennium Development Goals agreed.
And things turned really improbable when Geldof announced it was his birthday.
There was long pause while everyone accepted that etiquette dictated that they sing him Happy Birthday. Unfortunately no one seemed to know the words, and quite a lot of people seemed to feel they were too busy and important. Anyway, the room made a hash of it.
Or maybe they just didn’t like Mondays.
Where are you, Rob?
While one Robert appeared unexpectedly, another was notable mostly by his absence: Rob Wilson, minister for civil society, who somehow failed to attend any of the specialist charity events at his own conference.
It’s a sad day, in Diary’s view, when a charity event at a party conference features more ageing rock stars than ministers for civil society.
It was a thin week in general for the intrepid scribes of Diary’s alma mater, who’ve been beavering away at the party conferences and eagerly awaiting the words of the sector’s minister and shadow minister.
Only one problem. Neither of them turned up for anything.
Anna Turley, the newly appointed shadow minister, at least had an excuse. The steelworks in her constituency of Redcar closed down, and she went back home to handle the huge amount of trouble this had caused.
There were no redundancies to speak of in Reading, so far as Diary is aware, and Rob Wilson, minister for civil society, was at the conference. He just didn’t seem to fancy talking to people who actually work at charities.
Tell me why, we don’t like Muslims
Still, Rob Wilson’s party helped him out by cancelling an event or two.
Specifically, of course, Acevo and the Muslim Charities Forum organised an event to talk about more tolerance and discourse between Muslim charities and wider society, but the Tories cancelled it and refused to say why. We’ve been asking them for five days, and the party has spent five days pretending that Civil Society News just doesn’t exist.
We know why they cancelled it, of course. The Daily Telegraph wrote a wholly ridiculous and probably defamatory article accusing one of the speakers, Othman Moqbel of Human Appeal, of being a terrorist. Rather than look into whether he was or not, the party binned him anyway. Because obviously it’s more important to look good in the Telegraph than it is to actually be fair to your own citizens.
Actually, the Tories could be pretty sure the poor bloke wasn’t a terrorist. He’d already been the subject to a police background check, after all, in order to get a pass to the conference. One would hope that included some cursory inquiries into his enthusiasm for blowing stuff up.
The Tories were so scared of this dangerous sympathiser that they allowed him to keep his security pass and mingle freely with delegates for three days. Evidently a real danger to security.
