A well-placed source told me recently that late last year the BBC pulled plans to show the Oscar-winning film American Beauty on BBC1. Why? Because it stars Kevin Spacey, who had at that point just been accused of sexually inappropriate behaviour. Spacey, who is now seeking treatment for his problems, has not been convicted in
Why is Alan Yentob still in charge of a seven-figure programme budget at the BBC? It’s a question that Yentob’s friend, BBC chief Lord Hall, should have asked himself a long time ago. It should be asked this week because Yentob is entangled in an Insolvency Service investigation which may be about to come to an end.
It was surreal to sit in the Donmar Warehouse and watch Committee, a musical based on the investigation into the charity Kids Company. The first oddity was that anyone ever thought to write a musical based on the transcript of a Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. The second, that this production wouldn’t have existed
To her supporters, Camila Batmanghelidjh is a deeply caring woman whose charity Kids Company was cruelly extinguished last summer thanks to unfair press speculation about its finances which later turned into a fully-blown media witch-hunt. To those of us who know our way around the Kids Company story, Camila Batmanghelidjh is certainly deeply caring, but
A year ago, The Spectator blew the top off the Kids Company scandal – it was to take Fleet Street months to catch up. Here’s Miles Goslett’s original article, revealing not just the chaos within the charity but how civil servants wanted to stop charity boss Camila Batmanghelidjh’s funding but were overruled by 10 Downing
We continue our rundown of the top 10 most-read Spectator articles of 2015: No7 is Miles Goslett’s exposé of Kids Company, published in February. As Goslett related six months later, this was the first piece to break the taboo on criticising the charity – and had it all. The questionable finances, the way civil servants were nervous about continuing
The BBC’s spin doctors will be broadly happy at the coverage Alan Yentob’s ‘resignation’ as BBC Creative Director has generated, but licence fee payers should not be so pleased. For, on closer inspection, the whole thing is a gigantic swizz. Yentob may have relinquished his £183,000 salary, and his executive status, but it is now
Today’s National Audit Office report into the collapse of Kids Company shines new light on the scandal. It shows that the charity received at least £46 million of public money during its 19 year existence despite repeated warnings from civil servants that funding it was unwise. The report also shows that ministers thought they knew best,
Until February 2015, when The Spectator published my article on Kids Company, not a single bad word about it or its chief executive Camila Batmanghelidjh had appeared in the mainstream media. This may seem surprising now, as the scale of the scandal surrounding the now-defunct charity unfolds, but for the best part of 20 years
The charity Kids Company is under so much pressure that some people are starting to worry about its outgoing chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh. Recent reports of financial mismanagement published in The Spectator and elsewhere have contributed to Batmanghelidjh being forced to quit her £90,000 post, which she has promised to vacate by October 31, but
In 2006, when David Cameron was leader of the opposition, he made an infamous speech that is remembered as an exhortation to hug a hoodie. Feral youth, he said, should be helped rather than demonised. He was reaching towards what he hoped would be a new, ‘compassionate’ conservatism inspired in part by the charismatic social
Over the last three years the BBC has secretly obtained millions of pounds in grants from the European Union. Licence fee payers might assume that the Corporation would have been compelled to disclose the source of this money in its annual reports, but they bear no trace of it specifically. In the latest set of accounts,
Last December I received a telephone call concerning Jimmy Savile’s apparent sexual abuse of underage girls in the 1970s. The details I heard were pretty chilling, but the negative reaction when I tried (unsuccessfully) to report the claims in the national press was equally troubling. There is every indication that the Leveson inquiry into press standards was
