A champagne reception at a Mayfair hotel, a few months ago. A roomful of influential women had gathered to listen and pay homage to the celebrity guest speaker. She was their role model; virtually a living saint.
When she swept into the room in her familiar multi-coloured robes and turban, beaming with her usual beneficence, one could feel the communal love and admiration. The applause for her was warm and extended.
Camila Batmanghelidjh has long been feted as Britain’s undisputed charity queen. Kids Company, which she founded 19 years ago, has helped tens of thousands of vulnerable children and their families from underprivileged and violent inner-city backgrounds in London and, more recently, across the UK.
There was no one else prepared to go so selflessly into battle for these young victims of society’s failings with the same vigour and apparent success as the charismatic Iranian.
Along the way, she became a media darling; a celebrity in her own right, who charmed those sent to interview her, even persuading some to join the Kids Company cause as mentors.
And as she spread the word, Kids Company grew from its modest South London roots to become a national organisation with an annual budget of £25 million, funded by small private donations, major corporations, rock stars and the taxpayer (through government grants).
In 2013, Whitehall gave Kids Company £9 million in funding until March 2015. The Big Lottery Fund has provided £1 million annually.
Naturally, such an achievement brought a slew of awards for Camila.
The so-called ‘Angel of Peckham’ was named Businesswoman Of The Year, Entrepreneur of the year, Most Admired Chief Executive and granted a number of honorary university degrees. In 2013, the BBC named Ms Batmanghelidjh as one of the 100 ‘most powerful’ women in the UK. That same month, she was appointed an honorary Commander of the British Empire.
And yet, the praise and the garlands were not the whole story
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It had become too much her personal fiefdom, some said; it was akin to a personality cult.
Vast sums of donor money were given out in packages, cash in hand, to children and young people, with no controls over how it was spent by them, some alleged. While it was at heart a force for good it was, at best, said to be an administrative and financial mess.
Questions have been raised behind closed doors about the way Ms Batmanghelidjh has run the charity
But nobody who knew dared go public.
Camila had friends in powerful places. Very powerful places. Her charity was a touchstone for celebrity philanthropists. The Prime Minister’s wife Samantha Cameron was a supporter and a fan — naming Camila as her Inspirational Woman Of The Year in the Mail five years ago.
Encouraged to get involved by the Prince’s Trust, the rock group Coldplay have donated £8 million over a number of years.
Other patrons included tycoon Richard Branson, author J. K. Rowling, socialite Jemima Khan and Sting’s wife Trudie Styler, as well as investment banks such as Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley, retail giant John Lewis and Marlborough College, alma mater of the Duchess of Cambridge.
Alan Yentob, creative director of the BBC, is the Kids Company chairman.
And there was another discouraging factor for anyone close to the charity tempted to speak out. If challenged — and in private some dared — Camila could turn from sweet and twinkling to imperious and crushing in an instant. You really did not want to cross her.
The revelation yesterday that the Government would be withholding from Kids Company some £3 million of public funding unless she stepped down as its chief executive brought this paradox into the public domain at last.
Kids Company duly announced that its founder — who is a trained psychotherapist — was taking up a new position within the organisation, in an ‘advocacy and clinical role’.
A new chief executive would be appointed, but staff numbers would have to be cut because of ‘unprecedented financial strain’.
The charity has many well-known supporters such as Jemima Khan, pictured with Ms Batmanghelidjh
For her part, Ms Batmanghelidjh did the rounds of the BBC news shows on both radio and television to present her case for the defence. She denied claims of mismanagement, describing them as a ‘red herring’ to distract from the Tory Government’s child protection failures. She was, she said, merely the victim of ‘ugly’ political games.
Justice Secretary Michael Gove and his fellow Cabinet member Oliver Letwin are believed to have been behind the intervention.
A Downing Street spokesman said that the Prime Minister believed Kids Company still had a role to ‘give every child the best start in life’. But the Cabinet Office had asked for a change of chief executive ‘to ensure that their work is put on a sustainable footing’.
Ms Batmanghelidjh claimed, defiantly, she had held ‘uncomfortable discussions’ with the Government about child protection, adding ‘they can get rid of me but it doesn’t get rid of the problem’.
Addressing allegations made on the previous evening’s Newsnight that she doled out cash to youngsters, she said: ‘Middle-class parents give their children pocket money, why does it become a problem when it’s a poor child that’s being given money?’
Ms Batmanghelidjh came to England from Tehran when she was 12, and attended Sherborne public school. She gained a first-class degree at Warwick University and started Kids Company in 1996.
In recent years, a handful of investigative journalists have been drawn to examine the charity’s peculiar modus operandi.
In her 2012 book Among The Hoods, Harriet Sergeant described visiting, a number of years previously, an unnamed London charity HQ where children were given weekly cash-in-hand payments. ‘Every Friday the staff handed out cash in envelopes ranging from £50 to £200,’ she wrote. ‘The allowance appeared to be the key to the popularity of the centre. “You don’t see most of the kids coming on any other day,” admitted one member of staff.
‘Many young people agreed. “I come on Friday lunchtimes to socialise, pick up my allowance, then I go.”
‘The young people resented the fact that some got more than others. They accused the head of the charity of favouritism.’
Another passage described: ‘Four or five cars queuing up [outside]. Young people jumped out of them and ran into the community centre. They returned moments later, waving their envelopes in the air and grinning. Then they were driven away.’
That charity, Sergeant has recently revealed, was Kids Company.
Freelance investigative journalist Miles Goslett was perhaps the first to name and raise concerns about Kids Company in print, in an article last year for The Oldie magazine. He then expanded on these issues in The Spectator, before participating in Thursday’s Newsnight report.
It is claimed that the charity handed out cash to some of the children it was helping to attend events
Yesterday, he said: ‘I was contacted by two former Kids Company staff members in 2012 who told me they had long-standing concerns about the way Kids Company was run.
‘Their concerns were mainly, but not exclusively, financial.
‘For example, they told me children who attended the charity had regularly received cash handouts which, in some cases, were very large — hundreds of pounds. They said drugs and designer clothes were often purchased with this money, and the people who were being given the money were the very opposite of the picture most charitable people would form in their mind if they heard the words “vulnerable children”.
‘They also said the charity’s claims about the numbers it helps were confusing. Other charities which are less well known had been sidelined because of the vast amount of government money Kids Company received, they said.’
Goslett spent a ‘considerable amount of time’ looking into these allegations: ‘I spoke to former clients and staff members from the charity. Similar concerns were raised by them, independently.
‘One young lady who had been a client told me she wished she’d never had anything to do with Kids Company, and that, having received lots of cash over several years, she could now see it was a fool’s paradise.’
By chance, Goslett met Joan Woolard, a 78-year-old widowed grandmother of eight from Lincolnshire who had sold her house and given the charity the £200,000 proceeds — a rash but heartfelt gesture.
‘She told me she had never been told how her money had been spent,’ says Goslett. ‘When she raised questions about this, Camila Batmanghelidjh produced a report which Joan felt didn’t answer them.
‘Camila eventually accused Joan of having mental health problems, which made me wonder why she hadn’t returned Joan’s donation if she didn’t think she was of sound mind. The sensitivity around anybody scrutinising the charity was palpable.’
Three directors quit Kids Company in March this year. One told Goslett they were fed up with the chaotic way in which it is run: ‘The problem is Camila. The charity would function better without her.’
It now seems that view has also been held by senior Whitehall figures for some time. Goslett was told that Alan Yentob, chairman of the charity’s trustees, had gone to the Cabinet Office in March when the Government stalled over funding Kids Company and, according to a source, ‘thrown a fit’ in order to release the money. The strains in the relationship between Ms Batmanghelidjh and the Government were clear last autumn.
Then, she had warned that Kids Company could not survive until the end of that year unless the Government released ‘significant funding’.
She was, she said, having to ‘beg on behalf of society’ to protect ‘many thousands of children on the streets of London and Bristol, exposed to criminality, rape and homelessness.’
It was a fight she lost. The Angel of Peckham is mortally wounded.
Now, we must hope the vision she nurtured will live on in a way that can be sustained for the benefit of children who need it most.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk
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