He looked like a pudding waiter sitting next to a bowl of fruit salad
EVERYTHING about Camila Batmanghelidjh is such a mad muddle – her name, dress-sense, logic, grasp of detail – that you wonder how a supposed intellectual such as Alan Yentob fell for her.
Perhaps he mistook her for something from one of those Commonwealth novels on the Booker Prize shortlist. Perhaps his patronising egalitarianism just found her too yummily multi-cultural to resist.
She arrived at Parliament yesterday wrapped in textiles of 100 colours: yellows, pinks, scarlets, greens, indigos, and more tartan than they use in the carpets at Balmoral. She’s as tall and wide as a heavyweight wrestler, with Ronnie Barker spectacles and a Robbie Coltrane chin. Her accent is what a chef might call fusion: West Country by way of Tehran, Brick Lane and the Caribbean.
Plain-suited Mr Yentob, shrivelling beside this vivid creature, could have been a junior pudding waiter next to an urn of fruit salad.
Scarlet-painted talons protruded from plaid-patterned, tipless gloves. Her multicoloured turban rose towards the ceiling, high as a Victorian’s stovepipe hat. On her vast frontage she wore a rosette that would have put Cruft’s to shame. Her outfit was completed by cherry-coloured training shoes and earrings as long as lavatory chains.
‘I think you can see she is an unconventional chief executive,’ whimpered Mr Yentob.
As she swept into the room where she and little Yentob were to be questioned by the Public Administration Select Committee, she was very much The Presence. A crowd had gathered and the parliamentary authorities were twitchy. Miss Batmanghelidjh beamed. Mr Yentob should have been her senior partner but he more closely resembled her punkhawallah.
The committee, chaired by polite Bernard Jenkin (Con, Harwich and N Essex), wanted to know about the demise of Kids Company, a partly state-funded charity run by Miss B under Mr Yentob’s supposed supervision. MPs wanted to know: Were unruly teenagers given thousands of pounds in cash? Was some of that money spent on drugs? Did Mr Yentob lean on junior BBC staff to report the charity’s problems in a favourable manner?
Miss Batmanghelidjh, with a fixed smile, pitied MPs for their ignorance. She attacked the media. She burbled about what terrible suffering she, the great mother duck, had tried to heal. She barged past MPs’ questions, steamrollering them with her insistence. Mr Yentob sighed. He thought about trying to restrain her but often gave up.
Thanks to Mr Jenkin we learned that she had no medical or professional qualifications. It may seem bizarre that such a selfappointed figure became the must-have item in the salons of political London but that is to underestimate the currency of fashion, over which a figure such as Mr Yentob – the great cultural commissar luvvie of our state broadcaster! – held such sway.
Did she play them for fools? How easily they capitulated.
MR Yentob said he was ‘immensely proud’ of Kids Company but the lack of clarity in his and Miss B’s replies left the MPs openly derisive. It was not at all clear how many teenagers they helped. Rigorous regulatory checks seem to have been absent.
Paul Flynn (Lab, Newport W) accused Miss Batmanghelidjh of spouting ‘psychobabble, this torrent of words, verbal ectoplasm’. It reached the point that when she offered to speak, MPs cried, ‘Nooooo!’ Mr Jenkin demanded, ‘Order!!’ Miss Batmanghelidjh told him off for shouting.
As for the hapless Yentob, what a mediocre, credulous figure he cut. Mr Jenkin pointed out that charity trustees were under a duty to resist ‘dominant personalities’. Miss Batmanghelidjh, listening to this, grinned. Mr Yentob looked down at his papers and trembled.
Here, supposedly, is one of our leading art critics, his whole reputation built on discernment. How can he have been so naive?
He plainly behaved disgracefully when trying to push BBC staff around. The only thing that can be said for his continued employment by the Corporation is that it is not the most extraordinary part of this most modern of cautionary fables.