The moment Captain Tom’s daughter told me she knew people thought she’d taken all the money

It is sometimes easy to forget how quickly the phenomenon that was Captain Tom Moore exploded into the public domain during the early days of the pandemic lockdown. On 6 April 2020, he woke up as an entirely anonymous 99-year-old, approaching his centenary. Later that day he began his walk up and down the driveway for charity, aided by a Zimmer frame. His daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore sent out a press release and two weeks later Captain Tom Moore was world famous.

The veteran may have moved slowly on his daily perambulations around the grounds of the home he shared with his daughter and her family, the Old Rectory in the Bedfordshire village of Marston Moretaine, but around him, things were happening fast.

On day 18, when Tom was well over halfway to raising – by his own efforts, supported by Hannah – just under £38.9m for NHS Charities Together, Hannah and her husband, Colin Ingram-Moore, registered the company Club Nook. They set about securing intellectual property in her father’s name for the company, but Tom Moore was not a director.

By day 29 – 5 May 2020 – Hannah had incorporated the Captain Tom Foundation charity. A week after that, on her father’s behalf, she signed a three-book deal with Penguin which, we now know, secured an advance of £1.5m. The money went straight to Club Nook. Not a pound has ever been paid to the charity. By day 37 Hannah and Colin had just made £1.4m.

When I travelled out to interview Hannah Ingram-Moore at her home in 2022, these stark facts, and many more besides, were still obscured – the Charity Commission’s inquiry had to invoke its statutory powers to elicit the details of the arrangement from Penguin.

During our meeting, Hannah spoke a lot about the love they had felt from the public during that time, the love that her father had inspired, and the love that would drive his legacy forward. I wanted to believe her – and thought she was sincere in her desire to do good in her father’s name.

I can’t pretend there weren’t doubts, but I never contemplated the scale of the apparent self-interest as revealed by the Charity Commission’s report. It found “serious and repeated instances of misconduct and/or mismanagement” by Hannah and her husband in relation to the Captain Tom Foundation which, the Commission said, had “damaged public trust and confidence” in the charity, and in charities more widely.

They have now both been disqualified from serving or working with charities – Hannah for 10 years and Colin for eight years.

There were alarm bells even in 2022. The Club Nook first-year accounts showed an unexplained income of just over £800,000. After our meeting, I asked Hannah for an explanation and she told me: “I can confirm that Club Nook has not profited from branded merchandise/memorabilia, that Club Nook has not been paid by the Foundation for use of its trademarks and that Club Nook’s revenues have been generated by other activities.”

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How then had it made £800,000? When I asked in a follow-up email what those “other activities” were she did not reply. She was equally unforthcoming about the salary she was to be paid as the chief executive of the foundation. The Charity Commission makes clear that she did initially anticipate a figure of £150,000 a year, but this was scaled down and she ended up being paid much less.

The Commission’s report goes into some detail about a deal with a gin company and the blurred margin between personal gain and charitable benefit. As it happened, I had asked Hannah about the gins and she told me the company was run by a family friend in Yorkshire, someone her father was fond of. She suggested she was giving him a helping hand by entering into an arrangement.

Hannah stopped communicating with me after our final exchanges in 2022. I have often invited her to comment on the allegations that have been made since. She has said her father wanted the family to have the benefit of the books he wrote, but that was not what he appeared to say in the prologue to the first book, Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day, in which he welcomed the book as an opportunity to “raise even more money for charity”. Nor was it what I was told by others who told me that Tom had no interest in money and expected it all to go to charity.

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Hannah’s observations about the love felt by her father and her family from the public were tempered by negativity they had encountered from some, especially on social media.

“We were innocents [when it started],” she told me. “We had no idea. We’d only done this for love and for hope and for trying to raise a bit of money. We’d never ever considered a dark side. Never.”

They had developed resilience. A thick skin. She was not exactly sure why, but she had come to realise that some people expected her to be found out… “to find the story that I perhaps took all the money, that might be it.”

That couldn’t be further from the truth, she insisted. “There’s been many, many, many hours and a lot of money that was put in, that we’d never take back. That we willingly gave.”

She attributed some of the negativity about her to suspicion of a successful woman. But she would not be deterred. Her father had believed in the idea of the charitable foundation, she said.

“We had a vision, we had a mission, we had a brand, but beyond that it was him and after he died we recognised that we were slightly purposeless. We had all this love and all this reach… and that’s what I’ve spent most of my time doing, really defining who we are as a charity, how can we, with what we’ve got, have the greatest, positive impact on society.”

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I would welcome the opportunity to ask Hannah how those sentiments could be reconciled with the personal gain from the Penguin contract and how they could be squared with a spa and pool building which they had built on the grounds of their home and then had to dismantle because it had been built without the proper permission.

Hannah was full of plans when we met – none have yet happened and quite probably never will. There was the film about her father’s life – there was a first draft script and Michael Caine had been mentioned to play him. There was exclusive footage they had shot for an eventual documentary, plans for an annual charitable Captain Tom Day, and there would be another book – Hannah’s autobiography for which she had already written six chapters.

It would be the human story, she told me, of being the daughter, going on that journey with her father and all the things she had been taught by both her parents (her mother, Pam, died in 2006 aged 71).

Hannah paused and thought. “We’re not unbalanced, we’re okay,” she said. “Life can be difficult but I think we are super resilient. We were thrust into this and as the wife, mother, daughter, business leader I had to rise to the challenge.”

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There was another pause. “Not always to perfection. I don’t always get it right. We’re not perfect, we try our best.”

In 2022, Hannah assured me that she wanted to be accountable to the public. It is a matter of sadness, perhaps, that in the end, accountability has been forced on them, and has come from the outside scrutiny of the Charity Commission.

It is also a matter of some regret that even now Hannah’s response to the findings of the Commission isn’t contrition, but a reflection of how it has all affected her. She described the commission’s inquiry as a “harrowing and debilitating ordeal” which had left the family feeling suspended in “constant fear and mental anguish”.

A quote on her website, attributed to Hannah, described how she feels a “weight of responsibility for doing the right thing, for not letting people down and responding to the love and compassion that has come our way”.

What Captain Tom’s verdict would be on actions that seem to have strayed so far from his own ideals and values, we can only imagine.