Face it Camila, your ego killed off Kids Company
IAM a good friend of Alan Yentob and I’ve met Camila Batmanghelidjh a few times, so – deep breath. This is nothing I wouldn’t say to their faces.
The former chief executive and former chairman of the former charity Kids Company had one last chance to make it right after the charity collapsed in the summer under the weight of claims of financial mismanagement and – the last straw for a kids charity – sexual abuse.
They’d been hauled before MPs to explain how they’d made such an apparent Horlicks of it despite the lashings of public money ladled their way by successive, smitten Ministers and Prime Ministers.
But Camila refused even to allow the chairman of the Public Administration Select Committee, Bernard Jenkin, to call Kids Company a ‘failing charity’ – two months after it went bust – without her ziggurat-like turban quivering with affront.
When questioned on how many children she actually helped – with vast sums frittered on mortgages, designer clothes, private school fees, personal chauffeurs and those dubious weekly hand-outs in brown envelopes – it was a classic case of never apologise, never explain.
At one point even a £580,000 tax bill – that had been magicked away with one phone call to the right person in a high place – was ‘conceptualised’, according to Camila.
Instead of coming to the Commons to give straight answers to straight questions, what we got was a three-hour ‘torrent of verbal ectoplasm’, as one MP put it. Alan occasionally put his head in his hands.
Now, nothing that’s happened suggests for a second that either had bad intentions. They were the Good Samaritans while we all passed on the other side. They were the ones who gave freely of their own time and money to help ‘vulnerable’ children who’d fallen through the cracks of the State. The sad thing is that is exactly beside the point. The point is not their generosity with their own money – Camila put up her flat as collateral, Alan gave £250,000 – but their carelessness when it came to other people’s. Ours.
I spoke to another chairman of a charity who explained it. ‘The burden on those who have been given money should be greater than the burden on those who merely have to manage other people’s,’ he said.
It doesn’t help their case that the charity was run by the same people for two decades, while even at my small sports club up the road, nobody’s allowed to sit on the membership committee for more than two years in case they begin to think the place is their personal fiefdom. Why did the trustees and directors not ‘refresh’ the leadership, despite
evidence that the CEO had lost her sense of accountability to her loyal and long-serving chairman? Where were they?
We should all pay tribute to the good the charity did, by trying to ‘heal troubled children with love’, many thousands of them for whom Kids Company was their only family. I feel for BBC lifer Alan, whose executive role at the Corporation is now said to be under threat as a result of his doughty but conflicted efforts to preserve the charity he chaired.
But I don’t blame Alan so much as kind but out-of-control Camila and her addiction to soft power, while she should have been practising tough love instead. She created a culture of dependency; and she appeared dependent on her own cult.
As she stood in her robes and posed for photographers after the session, the captain of the ship still beaming after the boat has gone down, I thought this is how she will be remembered: for her catastrophic stewardship of her charity, not for her loving kindness to children in need.
The sad truth is that she needed Kids Co more than Kids Co needed her, and she brought both down.