He began the week looking forward to a break in Tuscany and ended it barely containing his emotions as he jabbed a finger at the Channel 4 presenter Matt Frei and refused to resign his position at the BBC. For Alan Yentob, the creative director of the BBC and chair of trustees for the charity Kids Company for 18 years – a man who in a long career at the corporation has remained determinedly unruffled – it has been a long seven days.
As chair of the charity at the centre of a media storm for weeks, he has come under growing pressure to explain how Kids Company came grinding to a halt this week, leaving thousands of children in a vacuum of care.
And it has begun to show. Yentob lost his cool during an interview on Channel 4 News on Thursday night, raising his voice to Frei and pointing a finger at the presenter as he spoke.
Yentob has stood alongside the chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh, at Kids Company almost from the beginning. He has seen it grow from its original London base in Southwark into a huge organisation with 36,000 children on its books and bases in Liverpool and Bristol.
In the last few days he has consistently denied any financial mismanagement of the charity, insisting that auditors always passed its accounts. He has not addressed why the advice of the charity’s own financial directors to build up some financial reserves was not heeded, or why civil servants latterly felt giving more millions of pounds of public funds to the charity was not value for money. “There’s no financial mismanagement,” he said on Channel 4 News repeatedly. “Am I allowed to say that?”
When challenged about whether there was a conflict of interest in his role as the BBC’s creative director and the way he contacted the team at Newsnight to challenge them on their planned story about Kids Company, he denied any such conflict. When pressed, he apologised for becoming emotional and said: “I have had to watch what has happened to hundreds of thousands of children. I will answer your question in due course.”
Emotions – and perhaps regrets – are certainly running high. Yentob last month told the Evening Standard, with whom Kids Company had a close relationship, that he was sorry as chair of trustees that the charity had not built up a financial reserve to fall back on, saying it was “probably a mistake to operate hand tomouth with no reserves”, and admitting that the charity would need reserves of at least £3m in the future.
At one point early in the week he was interrupted as he sat drinking coffee near the BBC and chased by at least one reporter. Since the Kids Company crisis escalated a few weeks ago, his phone number has been given, friends say, to “everyone”, and he has become a big part of the story.
In the interview with Frei on Thursday, his first since the charity closed on Wednesday night, Yentob said he saw no reason to resign from the BBC. He will stay in his post there, and as for Kids Company, he said he will work to make sure the young people find alternative support, which he believes is the priority now.
There have not been any apologies this week or admissions of mistakes in the handling of a charity that was in the top 5% nationwide in terms of income, had a 77% increase in funding over five years, and could call on a wide range of high-profile politicians and celebrities to back it.
Many much smaller charities engaging in similar work with marginalised young men and women would have given anything for a slice of Kids Company’s funding. Many on a fraction of the income are still struggling on.
