Leave Captain Tom’s daughter alone

Two years after his death, the army veteran and patron saint of the NHS, Captain Tom, is in the headlines again. Hannah Ingram-Moore, his daughter, has come under fire for allegedly using the Captain Tom Foundation’s name to build a spa and swimming pool complex at her house. 

The story of Captain Tom captured the jumbled imagination of the British public during the pandemic. In April 2020 at the height of the coronavirus fright and lockdown, Captain Tom decided to walk 100 laps of his garden to raise £1,000 for the NHS in honour of his 100th birthday. In under a month, he raised £39 million. 

In a time of depressing, repetitive news cycles, Captain Tom was instantly catapulted to the status of national treasure. Hannah Ingram-Moore ensured her father’s campaign achieved far more than the Captain initially set out to do: a number one single, an autobiography, a film adaptation of his life, a promotion to honorary colonel as well as a knighthood by the Queen and an estimated 400 interviews.

Was Hannah Bedfordshire’s answer to Kris Jenner, the savvy matriarch and manager of the Kardashian empire? Or had we all just gone a bit mad – and the national fixation on Captain Tom showed a country that was losing the plot? 

Captain Tom mania was conspicuously, almost deliberately mad, in the way that a lot of viral phenomena are. You could even buy a mini-skirt with his face on it. With her background in sales distribution, Hannah fed the beast. Her father got on Piers Morgan’s ‘Life Stories’ and the cover of GQ. 

But after the pandemic madness receded, the Captain Tom story started to feel less good. In March 2021, Hannah stepped down as a trustee for the foundation, which was subsequently investigated by the charity watchdog for paying over £50,000 to companies run by Ingram-Moore and her husband. 

It now emerges that the Ingram-Moores submitted a planning bid to Central Bedfordshire Council in August 2021 to build a ‘Captain Tom Moore Building’ which was ‘for use by…(the) Captain Tom Foundation’. They said the space was needed ‘urgently’ for presentations and memorabilia. But the charity’s trustees told the Sun, which first reported the story:

‘At no time were The Captain Tom Foundation’s independent trustees aware of planning permissions made by Mr and Mrs Ingram-Moore purporting to be in the foundation’s name. Had they been aware of any applications, the independent trustees would not have authorised them.’

For those who want to continue supporting The Captain Tom Foundation, unfortunately that’s not possible for the moment. According to its website, its ‘sole focus…is to ensure that it cooperates fully with the on-going Statutory Inquiry by the Charity Commission’. As a result, it’s ‘not presently actively seeking any funding from donors’.

Ingram-Moore has declined to comment on the latest accusations and many have been too quick to think the worst of her. Really, we should blame ourselves. It should have been quite obvious to anyone who hadn’t gone stir-crazy in lockdown that the Captain Tom story was a magnificently orchestrated PR stunt. We were all suckers. We were all too wrapped up in the bizarre idea that the lockdown was some sort of war-time moment — a life-changing event that demanded courage from all of us, even if that just meant baking banana bread and handing on a small part of our furlough to the Captain Tom appeal.

Most of us won’t admit it, but we now feel like fools for forgetting that the NHS is not actually a national church to which we are all obliged to offer up alms and nightly thanks.

So we shouldn’t judge Hannah Ingram-Moore too quickly. Perhaps the building was a genuine bid to enact Captain Tom’s wishes and she was going to build a space for NHS staff to unwind and thank them for the ‘million acts of kindness’ they showed him that inspired his fundraising walks in the first place. Because the real story of Captain Tom is about what happens when a nation loses its marbles. I’m putting my skirt on eBay – and I’ll give the proceeds to some other charity.