A Donkey Conundrum

When she died suddenly, my favourite grandmother, who was a better human being than she was a driver, left behind by way of a legacy, an annoying obligation on me to keep bank-rolling two (allegedly) sad donkeys called Barney and Clover, who lived lives of what looked to me like luxury and happiness in a rustic and wholesome sanctuary in the West Country.

‘It will do you good,’ she had said when explaining it a couple of years before. ‘It will keep your feet on the ground, and give you some responsibility.’ I was 26 at the time, and was the Operations Officer of a battalion then deployed on active service, so she obviously set a high bar on ‘responsibility’. But I had been brought up alongside donkeys, so it made sense, and I went along with it.

Each year around December 1st, I would get a photocopied letter (this was the 1980s, you understand), with pictures of Barney and Clover, a progress report, and a reminder that life in the donkey business was tough and, cough cough, would I mind sending another stiffener.

Marriage brought someone more observant than me into the household, and Caroline duly pointed out a key problem: whilst the images of Barney and Clover changed each year, their life story didn’t, and hence my moral connection with them. It turned out that they had died many moons before, unlike the appetite for my money which hadn’t. Shortly after, I cancelled the standing order, and that was that….

….until a couple of days ago, when I got a message on some social media feed urging me to donate once again to a donkey charity. We live in a world of anxiety and need, so I decided to do a little digging, and see if the coin fell in the donkeys’ favour.

It didn’t, and here’s why.

Search the Charity Commission website, and you will find more donkey charities than you could shake a stick at. They come in all shapes and sizes, but none bigger or more significant than the Donkey Sanctuary itself, which has 736 employees on its books who, one way or another, look after around 7,000 donkeys. Bearing in mind the average staff-student ration in an English secondary school is 1:15.9, I would say that the donkeys were doing pretty well.

All this costs around £42 million a year, a figure that you will be delighted know is dwarfed by the income of £63 million. Those lovable, forlorn creatures appear safe for the time being. 90% of that income comes from donations and legacies, of which about 80% comes from legacies alone. Being cute (‘charismatic’ is what we call it in the trade) is a very good precursor for raising money, which becomes itself a good precursor for staying alive, both as an individual and a species. Ask the plug ugly Tasmasian Thylacine -(you can’t, by the way, as the Aussies shot them all)- how much better off they would have been if they had been cute, like the giant panda.

The most interesting bit of a charity’s accounts is where they disclose the salaries of their highest paid people. The Donkey Sanctuary manages to have 5 employees on between £60-70,000, 6 on £70-80,000, 1 on £80-90,000, 2 on £90-100,000, 1 on £110-120,000 and 1 on £150-200,000. By all measures, these are stunningly generous remuneration packages. And you don’t need to be a weapons grade cynic to raise a quizzical eyebrow at the magnificence, and to wonder whether all those legators understood the largesse to which they were contributing.

I have nothing against donkeys, nor the charities that support them. How could I? I am, after all, the chair of trustees of a charity that supports curlews. They probably do useful work in donkey welfare and, importantly, alleviating donkey suffering. No, what I worry about is the gradual corporatisation of the charity sector, of which bonkers salaries (and the lengths people go to justify them) are but one symptom.

I think I have mentioned already that, when I am Prime Minister, no employee of any registered charity that intends to stay that way will be allowed to be paid more than £120,000 annually- (it was £100,000, but we have had a cost of living crisis). It is sheer baloney to say that you couldn’t get the talent for less than, say £200,000; working in a charity is a vocation, not an opportunity to clean up. Some of the most effective people I know are paid less than the living wage. Some of the most effective managers I know do it for well under £100,000 per annum.

Why am I making a fuss, if indeed I am? I suppose it is because I work on the active fringes of conservation, and I am heartily fed up with living in a world where so many of the young, highly qualified, superbly motivated workers who are trying to save our world and its wildlife, have to live in their parents’ home in order to have cash at the end of the month, or have to get evening and weekend jobs to make ends meet.

I am far from certain that UK PLC has its priorities right at the moment.