The two central figures in the Kids Company fiasco, Camila Batmanghelidjh and Alan Yentob, have been grilled by the Public Administration Committee this morning and it’s gone very badly for both. As you might expect, Batmanghelidjh shirked all responsibility for the collapse of the charity she founded – outrageously blaming civil servants who blew the whistle on her. Yentob, the charity’s chairman, angrily denied any conflict with his role as the BBC’s Creative Director. It didn’t quite get into ‘you can’t handle the truth!’ territory — instead it was ‘please, think of the children’ which is arguably worse. If either of them had done that sufficiently, the charity would not have collapsed.
Batmanghelidjh’s shirking of responsibility was frustrating for the committee members. When she asked the chair Bernard Jenkin, ‘on what basis do you describe this as a failing charity?’, he flatly responded ‘because it’s gone bust’. She argued that the charity shut down because of unfounded sexual abuse allegations, not financial mismanagement. Paul Flynn, one of the Labour members of the committee, accused her of providing a ‘torrent of verbal ectoplasm’. Jenkin’s exchanges with Yentob were just as testy: when the BBC man asked him ‘has your charity been going for 20 years?’, Jenkin said ‘my charity [Combat Stress] has been going for 100 years, actually. Yentob also suggested the government gave Kids Company £3 million to get it ‘out of their hair’.
Given that the charity went bust, you might expect both figures to show some humility but both defended their positions rigorously. Yentob admitted that he was standing with the producer of the Today programme when Batmanghelidjh was interviewed but said ‘the issue of the BBC and my life at the BBC is entirely separate to this’.
Notably, the committee focused its scrutiny on Yentob, and not Batmanghelidjh — who is essentially now a busted flush. Each time she interrupted Yentob, Jenkin told her to be quiet. It’s as if she wants to be the star of the show, but her moment has passed. Instead, the committee appeared more interested in Yentob, whose job at the BBC now hangs in the balance. The appearance has raised more questions about the whole Kids Company saga than it answered.
For further reading, here’s The Spectator’s coverage of Kids Company:
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