The Covid-19 pandemic sometimes seems unreal now. It was a weird fever dream of existence in which we gauged whether we were more or less than six feet apart and debated whether a Scotch egg was a “substantial meal”. What was normal and what was profoundly odd?
In April 2020, a former British Army officer less than a month from his 100th birthday, Captain Tom Moore, decided to help NHS Charities Together by walking 100 laps of his Bedfordshire garden, 10 laps of 27 yards every day. He hoped to raise £1,000, a modest target but no small challenge for a 99-year-old man reliant on a walking frame.
When the story found its way to the media, it struck a deep emotional chord with the public. There was something quintessentially British about the unfussy determination of this quiet old man, a veteran of the Burma campaign’s “Forgotten Army” in 1944-45.
If we were uncomfortable that Captain Tom’s fundraising was necessary, we expiated that guilt with frenzied celebrations of his heroism: Michael Ball recorded “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (what else?) in his honour, he was appointed an honorary Colonel and in July 2020 he was knighted by the Queen at Windsor Castle. He had raised almost £40m.
After Sir Tom’s death in 2021, his daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore, and her husband Colin established the Captain Tom Foundation in his memory. But nothing is ever perfect. Last November, the Charity Commission found the Ingram-Moores culpable of misconduct, mismanagement and lack of integrity. A book deal worth £1.47m had benefited them rather than the charity, Ingram-Moore had been paid a salary of £85,000 by the foundation after initially demanding £150,000 to be its CEO, and the couple had trademarked “Captain Tom” through a private company.
It was a tawdry coda to a story of understated selflessness. But in a demonstration of how the values of an older generation co-exist with more modern and less altruistic mores, Ingram-Moore has come out swinging. Speaking to the BBC, she apologised for setting up the Captain Tom Foundation in her father’s name, which she called her “deepest regret”.
Regrets? She has only very few. Of the £1.47m book deal, she insists her father “wanted us to benefit and he chose where to put it. It was his money… He wanted to ensure that we lived well, that we had future income, because he could see that Covid had been quite devastating to our business”. There was, she insists, nothing dishonest about what happened, although publishers Penguin Random House and agents Carver PR claim to have been given repeated reassurances that the proceeds would go to the foundation.
square EMILY WATKINS
Shame on Captain Tom's family – but shame on the rest of us, too
Read MoreIn a characteristically modern twist, Ingram-Moore made an apology-that-wasn’t for this aspect of the affair. “I’m sorry they feel misled, I genuinely am, but there was never any intent to mislead,” she said. It is a favourite formula nowadays: I am sorry that you mistakenly believe I have anything to apologise for. It uses the language of contrition but absolves the speaker of any blame in a strange form of moral gaslighting.
Ingram-Moore went further in a topsy-turvy exercise of appropriated victimhood. Setting up the foundation “all but completely derailed our lives”, she said, and complaints that the proceeds of the book deal were not passed on to the charity are “just a way to try and reverse-engineer the fact they want to us to be guilty of something”. (Charity Commission on line one, Ingram-Moore…)
“Here I am as a woman who’s worked predominantly in male-dominated businesses all my life successfully – now nobody thinks that that’s worth anything. It’s devastating.”
Those with a burning hatred of injustice will be relieved to know that Ingram-Moore may be down but she is not out. She plans to fight back with three books of her own.
The first, to be (self-)published later this year, is entitled Grief: Public Face, Private Loss, and will offer “insights from my personal journey” to help others “navigate emotions and honour loved ones” (though not, presumably, through the establishment of charitable foundations). This will be followed by a book on resilience, which she certainly does not lack, and an autobiography will complete the trilogy in 2026.
It is a masterclass in brass neck and inverting the narrative. The ease with which Ingram-Moore has brushed aside “significant” personal gain, “serious and repeated instances of misconduct and/or mismanagement” and a 10-year disqualification from being a trustee is breathtaking. But the real measure of shamelessness is her Alice-like journey through the looking glass to a world in which she has been wronged and vilified, her reputation slaughtered on the altar of public opinion.
It is a seedy microcosm of the seamier side of contemporary Britain. Ingram-Moore is undone by haters, and she is sorry that they have misunderstood her. Shame is not just dead, it has been taken out in a professional hit and its body dumped on waste ground. What she wants is modern life’s most valuable prize and route to salvation: being the victim.
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