Kids company

To listen to Camila Batmanghelidjh on the Radio 4 this morning, you’d think that her upstanding charity had been mysteriously assassinated by a vicious media – and by nothing else. This sounded like a very different Camila Batmanghelidjh to the one who telephoned me after The Spectator first blew the whistle on the irregularities at Kids Company – she was apoplectic. Didn’t I know that journalists normally love Kids Company? Kids Company has now collapsed – and not because journalists had (finally) been allowed to start asking questions. It has collapsed because Camila Batmanghelidjh ran up financial costs that she was not able to cover. She ran the charity, the

Yesterday, Miles Goslett revealed on Coffee House how the beleaguered charity Kids Company was dealing with the allegations against it. His cache of emails revealed that it was using the £3 million grant it had received from government to pay staff, a direct violation of the terms of the donation. This evening, the charity has shut its services. In a statement, Kids Company boss Camila Batmanghelidjh and the charity’s trustees said: ‘We have been forced to do so because collectively, despite the extraordinary efforts of Camila and her team, some truly enlightened philanthropists and the government, we have not been able to raise enough money to meet the ongoing costs

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 uncomfortable questions remain: last week, a sex abuse investigation into the charity was launched by police.  In the small hours of yesterday morning I was sent, anonymously, a series of emails sent from Kids Company employee accounts over the last month. Some are written by Batmanghelidjh and provide an insight into how she is dealing

Quiet Fridays are the best sorts of days to bury bad news: or at least so the Whitehall wisdom goes. That doesn’t seem to have worked today, given that ministers’ attempts to bury three bits of awkward news have been picked up – and because it’s a relatively quiet news day, they’re getting a good amount of attention. Today is clearly a take-the-trash-out day, when ministers get rid of a load of announcements that involve them admitting they’re either doing something unpopular, or they’re not going to do something that they are supposed to be doing. Today’s trash includes: 1. The government is delaying the cap on social care costs

Questions about whether a particular charity fulfils its aims are being asked with increasing frequency these days, and quite right too. It’s no longer enough for a charity to have good intentions. They need to show that they’re putting those intentions to some sort of use because money is tight and need is high. There is an important point here about how we judge the kinds of services that are delivered by charities. The general assumption is that it is rather hard to judge how a charity performs. There is an absence of standardised and comparable measurement, and the evidence from evaluations is of poor quality. Some charities go so far as