Jolyon’s latest bizarre campaign is to support action against the Charity Commission (his new favourite enemy), which has refused to retract the conclusions of its report into the old disgraced charity Kids Company. The Good Law Project says it is supporting a Judicial Review into the collapse of the scandal-hit charity “to fully restore its reputation.” This is despite its CEO, Camila Batmanghelidjh, having died a year ago…
Over 19 years Kids Company – once a favourite of King Charles – attracted £115 million in donations from Richard Branson, Coldplay, JK Rowling, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and others. It also hoovered up £40 million of taxpayers’ cash before collapsing in the summer of 2015…
Sceptical questions about the charity were first asked in investigative journalist Miles Goslett’s groundbreaking investigation for the Spectator. He also told of how BBC boss and Kids Company trustee Alan Yentob secretly lobbied Treasury officials over an unpaid £689,000 employment tax bill which the charity had clocked up. In the end, £589,000 of the debt was secretly written off – at the taxpayer’s expense…
Goslett also revealed Batmanghelidjh had a chauffeur and a personal private swimming pool in a £5,000-a-month mansion – paid for from charity funds. BuzzFeed/BBC reporters Alan White and Chris Cook looked into the charity too, reporting the alleged sexual abuse of its clients. In a 2022 judgment that baffled many the High Court found that allegations of Kids Company’s financial mismanagement were unfounded. The Good Law Project is supporting a hare-brained effort to force the Charity Commission to “abandon its criticisms of Kids Company’s trustees” in a report which found it repeatedly failed to pay tax and its workers. It may go the way of some of his other noble efforts…
Speaking at his speech on how to achieve “progressive capitalism” Wes Streeting fired a dig and Andy Burnham:
“Bond markets are not bond villains and fiscal rules matter.”