Do they need a code of conduct to say bedding a harlot is wrong?
WHEN charity bosses start talking about their outfit as a ‘ brand’, like tinned meatballs, alarm bells should tinkle. When they jaw about ‘cross- organisational committees’ and ‘broader leadership teams’ and ‘safeguarding issues’ and hiring former senior policemen to make sure their staff are not abusing juniors, it may be evident this is no longer a simple good cause deserving of your loose change.
It has become a business, indistinguishable from other enterprises run by our blame- dodging, report- compiling, bureaucracy-bloating managerial elite.
Three top bods from Oxfam appeared in front of MPs yesterday to discuss the Haiti sex scandal in 2010, when workers allegedly entertained local prostitutes days after an earthquake in which 200,000 people died. You thought your money was going on food and blankets? How quaintly old-fashioned. Mark Goldring, Oxfam chief executive, had to cough up immediate regret for some high-handed indignation he expressed in a Guardian interview last week.
In that interview he appeared to poohpooh the gravity of the scandal. ‘I was talking under stress,’ blurted a miserable Mr Goldring. ‘I should not have said those things.’ It was one of numerous apologies he made.
To his left, more serene, sat Oxfam’s chairman, Caroline Thomson, once a bigshot at the BBC (she might have become its director general had scandals there played out differently).
She kept well out of trouble yesterday, repeatedly stressing she only arrived at Oxfam last year. With a grandiose air she said she had commissioned a report on its governance. To be important enough to commission reports? How delicious. While Mr Goldring was almost sobbing his sorrys, Miss Thomson remained utterly still, one superior, feline eyebrow arching its back. She’s a piece of work, Thomson: office-political, her moist Queen’s English not quite disguising a pale-eyed corporatist calculator.
SHE didn’t get where she is today by interrupting colleagues who were digging their own holes. Her husband is Labour peer and arch Europhile Lord Liddle. I have never heard him declare, when he raves about Brussels, that Lady Liddle’s charity has received millions from the very EU he wants us not to leave. Should he not do so?
On hapless Goldring’s other side sat Winnie Byanyima, executive director of