IS CAMILA AWAY WITH THE FAIRIES?
THE sight of Kirsty Wark interviewing Camila Batmanghelidjh on BBC2’s Newsnight last week left me somewhat alarmed. The founder of the Kids Company charity and the presenter were perched on chairs close to each other. I feared Batmanghelidjh, who was quivering with anger, might suddenly topple over and squish the life out of Kirsty.
Until I saw this encounter, I had no idea just how humongous the charity boss had become. There’s nothing morally wrong in that, but extreme obesity can be (in the absence of disease) an indicator of acute psychological problems. To say Batmanghelidjh is off her rocker might be putting it crudely, but when she claimed last week that the Government was cutting off its funding of Kids Company because ‘I know about sexual abuse claims against senior people’, it was evident she is either malevolent or (as I prefer to believe) away with the fairies.
I should have realised this over a year ago, when I read a newspaper interview in which the author described how when Batmanghelidjh ‘requires the assistance of her PA, she lets out a curious high-pitched noise. It’s not a particularly nice noise: you think instinctively of a dolphin in peril.’
It’s not just the disturbed young people looked after by Kids Company who need help. I was among thousands whose working day last Thursday was made a lot longer by the strike action of the RMT rail union. Unlike me, however, the great majority of those Londoners who depend on the Tube are much less well-off than the strikers. a newly qualified driver starts on £49,673 a year and gets 43 days of annual leave. a lot of their passengers would exchange their job for that, but they can’t because London Undergound operates what amounts to a closed shop. It reminds me of the behaviour of the newspaper print-workers in the 1980s — not least because the train drivers, like them, are doing a job which can be fully automated, and is in other countries. The RMT is acting rationally: its members have little time left to grab whatever they can.