Rebrand or redux?
The Charity Commission’s got itself a new logo and, yeah, it’s… well it’s a crown. A blue crown.
Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. Suffice is to say however that, as Diary has discovered this week, the revamped Commission logo isn’t exactly to everyone’s tastes.
At the risk of over-egging the pudding, this column thought it might be worth breaking the new Commission logo down into the sum of its parts. Now Diary is certainly no great aesthete, nor is it a learned scholar of iconography, but I think if we’re all being honest with ourselves, the new logo is awful.
Out go the warm and fuzzy images of happy, carefree people cavorting on some sunny stretch of beach. In comes the cold, austere outline of the royal crown. Almost identical to the logo of HM Prison Service, in the dark, austere blue of HM Police Service.
Hard to tell what type of message the Commission's trying to send, here. Are they trying to paint themselves as part of the long arm of the law?
That's probably ridiculous, though. After all, who designed this thing? They'd probably never...
Oh, the Ministry of Justice, you say?
But how did it get past the chair? Surely he'd want something more... fluffy?
What's that? The chair is the biographer of the Queen Mother? A man so royalist he once proposed accommodating Commission staff in a Portakabin made entirely of back copies of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: the Official Biography? How did he come to want a crown? Amazing.
Diary has decided to come up with some alternate logos for the Commission, should it feel that it ever needs to rebrand again. How about a lovely pair of knitting needles, mounted crossways like swords on heraldic shields of old and, beneath it – threaded through the eyes and gloriously embossed – entwined thick golden threads. Perhaps the golden threads could spell out some Latin motto: ‘Sic transit...’ or something.
Wait, that's the motto of Southern Railways.
Or perhaps a single, gauntleted fist descending from out a clear blue sky to crush a hapless, doddery old trustee. With "Should have read the effing guidance!" underneath.
Or maybe they should just have included some other headwear.
If you, dear reader, have any other suggestions, Diary sure would love to hear them.
A slur by any other name would sound as sweet
Diary’s attention has also been caught this week by the fact that Lord Alan Sugar – he of The Apprentice fame – has won £20,000 from the Daily Mail after he was called a "spiv" in an article.
Sugar took to Twitter to lord it over a “humiliated” Daily Mail, and pledged to donate the entire £20,000 to Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity.
Actually, Diary’s just going to let his Tweet speak for itself because it’s glorious.
As for the man who wrote the article...You’re fired!
I'm a patron of...
Earlier this week, Baroness Pitkeathley, chair of the new Lords committee on charities, apologised to those giving evidence after the committee’s first session overran by ten minutes.
Why? Mostly because every lord and lady who was asking questions had to first declare their interests.
All of them went something like this:
"I am the patron of the National Association for Sick Budgerigars, the president of the Lord Mayor's Official Charity for Wobbly Stools that Can't be Fixed by Putting a Bit of Paper Under Them, the chair of the board of the Royal Association for Finding Lost Socks that Disappeared from the Tumble Dryer, and a trustee of the Hunting-Bum-Fluff-Daily Village Hall."
And so on. Very civic-minded, but bloody time-consuming.
He's back!
(Maybe. Well probably not.)
Last year, Labour MP Ian Lavery confidently asserted to everyone, on Twitter and on his website, that he was the shadow minister for civil society, before eventually admitting that he, er, wasn't.
But now the actual shadow minister for civil society, Anna Turley, has stepped down, and Lavery is one of half a dozen ministers left on a lonely-looking front bench. So he's pinched the brief back - at least according to the Wikipedia page of HM loyal opposition.
