It’s a ghastly shame that Camila Batmanghelidjh was stopped from doing work we needed her to do

When it all came crashing down on Kids Company – and its founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh – I watched, bewildered. I’d followed their work closely, and thought Camila was doing a job that desperately needed doing; looking after children and teens who are so often written off or allowed to slip through the net.

She started the company in 1996 and counted everyone from Coldplay to Prince Charles as her supporters. She was part of David Cameron’s Big Society. Yet by 2015, she was being trashed in the press: her motives questioned, serious allegations made and her charity pulled to the ground. I had known Camila for years, both of us part of the Iranian community formed in London after the Iranian revolution of 1979.

I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old when I first met Camila. She was around seventeen or eighteen, and had come to help out at the Rustam school, where her mother, Lucille, worked. Back then, the school was in a couple of rented classrooms in an office block on the Edgware Road.

Just a handful of us London-Irani kids, trooping in on Saturdays to learn to write essays in Farsi, entitled, “Why I love springtime”, before racing off to McDonald’s for lunch. Nowadays, Rustam is huge – and is teaching a new generation of British Iranians theirAlef Ba.

Camila seemed terribly exotic to me – she wore colourful clothes, and was a quarter Swiss. Swiss! Hardly anyone was Swiss in those days. It seemed terribly fancy. I hovered around Camila whenever she came in. She talked to the little kids so calmly, even when they were naughty. Especially when they were naughty. I remember her telling me that she loved children, and wanted to work with them.

Years later, there she was, starting a centre in Peckham under the railway arches, where kids and teenagers who had nowhere else to go could get practical support, food and love. Camila proved herself to be a highly skilled fundraiser – Kids Company grew exponentially, employing 600 paid staff, thousands of volunteers and helping countless children.

A point ignored by many who criticise the vast amounts of money (some £40 million) donated by the government to Kids Company is that it was there, as Camila herself has explained, to, “pick up what they were failing to address”, with regards to child protection. I visited Kids Company myself – it was a huge operation. I met the staff, saw how brilliant they all were and heard countless accounts of how much they had helped.

I always thought Camila was a dramatic person (we Iranians are prone to dramatic self-expression) but also utterly genuine and capable.

For six and a half years, Camila has been fighting to clear her name. There were also abuse allegations made, which the Met Police dropped because there was “no evidence of criminality”.

This month she won her High Court disqualification case. The court also concluded that the charity might have survived if the unfounded claims of abuse hadn’t been made. 

She was “Emma Barnetted”, on BBC Woman’s Hour, after the ruling in her favour. Now, I’m enjoying Barnett as a new host – though, admittedly, her interview technique is a little, “You are now on trial”. But in this case, it served Camila not to be seen as coddled in anyway. She ever so politely – but robustly – pulled Barnett up on her tact, saying that Justice Falk (who said that the restructure would likely have succeeded, and the charity survived, if the allegations had not been made), “looked at the facts properly and did not jump to conclusions”.

As well as the false accusations against her regarding her charity, Camila was subjected (and still is) to the kind of abuse meted out only to women regarding her size and her dress sense. “An explosion in a Nigerian texile factory” was one of the more printable examples she gave, of comments she’d received. She talked about how her intelligence, competence and qualifications were more easily negated because of the way she looked. She stood out, she was unapologetic about the space she took up; and had the audacity of speaking confidently and eloquently – with a slightly foreign accent.

The press and politicians who pulled her down did not enquire with the same tenacity what happened to the kids that her company was supporting. The papers have been reporting that she has been “demanding an apology” from Michael Gove; who, just a year before, had given her a CBE. She made no demands. When Barnett asked her if she wanted an apology, her answer was, “I can live without an apology” – and insisted that those who were owed an apology were the children.

The utter denigration of Camila Batmanghelidjh by the press and by certain politicians (including Dominic Cummings, who had never met Kids Company; yet was allegedly briefing people against them) means it’s unlikely – even after this ruling – that her reputation will be restored in everyone’s eyes.

It was hard to listen to her interview with Barnett without feeling a ghastly shame: that this woman – whose MO was to relentlessly remind us that most of the children labelled “troublemakers” were in desperate need of being unconditionally loved; and that Kids Company was there to fulfil that need, first and foremost – was stopped from doing work we desperately needed her to do.