Tobias Langdon writes: It’s a short step from “respected” to “ridiculed.” Just ask Camila Batmanghelidjh, the charismatic Anglo-Iranian founder of the now-defunct children’s charity Kids Company. A year ago, she was a secular saint, idolized by thousands of British liberals:
Camila Batmanghelidjh is a world-renowned child psychotherapist and expert on the rehabilitation of maltreated children. … When I ask my peers about Camila, the chorus is the same. She is viewed as a larger than life heroine and absolute inspiration to the women I talk to from CEOs to fellow journalists. A 21st century Mary Poppins laced with the intellectual chutzpah of Hilary Clinton, the patience and compassion of Nelson Mandela and the steely business acumen of Martha Lane Fox. (Camila Batmanghelidjh — A Thoroughly Modern Mary Poppins Via the Turquoise Domes of Persia, The Ethical Hedonist, 16th February 2014)
“Huge discrepancies”
Now Kids Company has collapsed, and respect has turned to ridicule. A parliamentary committee has just questioned Camila and her Iraqi-Jewish sidekick Alan Yentob, “Creative Director” at the BBC. Even the Guardian and New Statesman were incredulous at the dynamic duo’s performance:
Today’s meeting of the public administration select committee has a reasonable claim to being the single weirdest event in recent parliamentary history. This was three solid hours of bewildering excuses, recriminations and non sequiturs. …
It was chaos from the start. The kaleidoscopically flamboyant Ms Batmanghelidjh — looking more than ever like a pile of Aladdin’s laundry — seemed incapable of giving a straight answer. Paul Flynn (Lab, Newport West) snapped that her replies were “verbal ectoplasm”. Mr Jenkin asked whether it was true that Kids Company routinely handed teenagers cash in brown envelopes. In the space of six seconds, Ms Batmanghelidjh said this was “a myth” and “not a myth”.
She claimed Kids Company had been “intensely inspected”, but proved unable to recall when its last inspection took place. Kate Hoey (Lab, Vauxhall) asked about a £580,000 tax bill. Ms Batmanghelidjh replied that the money had been “conceptualised”. … For some reason Mr Yentob kept putting his head in his hands. … How on earth did he get into this mess? And how on earth will he get out of it? — Alan Yentob’s day of embarrassment over Kids Company, The Daily Telegraph
With her kaleidoscopic outfits (topped by her trademark turban) and her implausible accent [Camila Batmanghelidjh] rose from nowhere to become the most extravagant self-creation since Liberace. Yes, she might have looked absurd — “like a pile of Aladdin’s laundry” as one critic put it — but you were never likely to miss her or forget her. What’s more, all that contrived ethnicity gave her a credibility which masked her privileged background (she was privately educated at Sherborne school for girls) and stopped people asking awkward questions about her suitability to be running a multimillion pound children’s charity. In this she exploited the same weakness in our culture so hilariously exposed by Ali G: we would rather be thought an idiot than be thought a racist. — Mystery of how Kids Company won so much support, The Daily Express
But Camila refused even to allow the chairman of the Public Administration Select Committee, Bernard Jenkin, to call Kids Company a ‘failing charity’ — two months after it went bust — without her ziggurat-like turban quivering with affront. When questioned on how many children she actually helped — with vast sums frittered on mortgages, designer clothes, private school fees, personal chauffeurs and those dubious weekly hand-outs in brown envelopes — it was a classic case of never apologise, never explain. — Camila Batmanghelidjh’s ego killed off Kids Company, The Daily Mail