It seems James Anderson, ‘Britain’s kindest plumber’, renowned through his own PR and across telly and press of doing great deeds to help the poorest and most vulnerable with free plumbing repairs, paying food shopping or energy bills, wasn’t that kind after all.
Somehow, some of the £2 million raised through the Community Interest Company, Depher ended up paying for his house and car. People he’d claimed to have helped were actually long dead; a mother and victim of domestic abuse was defamed as a thief; revealed another elderly recipient’s sexuality despite his pleas not to be filmed.
His story has many shades of that of the late Capt. Tom Moore (Sir Tom, for his efforts), who sought to raise £1,000 for the NHS by intrepidly doing 100 circuits – as his 100th birthday approach – of his garden with his walking frame. The story captured the nation’s heart and the target was bust by some £33 million.
Captain Tom Moore Foundation
It was the marketing skills of his daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore, that did a great deal to make so-good a feel-good story truly great. But the running costs of the Captain Tom Moore Foundation she set up for it all somehow reached hundreds of thousands of pounds, with a purpose-built office initially to include a spa, then a 50-foot swimming pool (since ordered demolished). The £800,000 made from his book went … to her family.
These people were less about tireless giving than the taking to better their own lives, if not flatter their own egos, i.e. exploitation. Still, for all the stinging rebuke Anderson and Ingram-Moore got in the mainstream press, far worse, as in actual threats, piled upon them on social media. Such can be the ire of folks when their faith – built on false marketing – is so cruelly dashed.
Trump
Yet they may have simply been lured into temptation, belatedly come to think they too deserved something. The flipside is using charity works to create good optics to favour our gaze upon the inherently wicked. One of Donald Trump’s innumerable legal car crashes concerns the fate of staggering sums raised through charity golf events on his courses for the advertised benefit of the St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, much of which somehow ended up elsewhere in his sprawling organisation and weirdly covering ‘costs’ for facilities initially claimed as free to use, and then costed at rates no accountant could practically justify.
The Don’s fictional predecessor might be Don Fanucci, the linen-suited extortionist in The Godfather Part II who shows off by donating a wad of notes to the effigy of the Virgin Mary during the Feast of San Rocco parade in Hell’s Kitchen – money that this wholly unholy thug racketed out of the hardworking locals at knifepoint, making for quite an unvirtuous circle of funding (didn’t save him from being killed within an hour, though).
Or to bring it back, the administration of Trump’s nemesis Joe Biden has been accused of ultra-cynically trying to look good by giving with one hand – but killing with the other – with its recent $95 billion foreign aid package, giving billions for weapons for Israel, but also billions for aid for Gaza’s civilian recipients of such ordnance. All optics that convince no-one.
Farage
From another direction you have political and financial opportuning amid calamities. During Covid we saw Nigel Farage banging a pan on his drive in the Thursday Clap for Carers, before he reverted to opportuning to ‘own NHS libs’ by eating too much chocolate at Easter (don’t give up the booze or fags either, Nigel, stay strong!) then attacking the proposed WHO treaty on fighting the kind of pandemic that led to the whole Clap for Carers thing at all, as some Orwellian Globalist enterprise.
Farage knows his audience, his market. Like Michelle Mone, or Baroness Mone OBE as she still is, knew her paymasters, never pretending there was anything altruistic about her £200m contract for (useless) Covid PPE gleaned from Boris Johnson’s crooked ‘VIP Lane’. Mone was one of many at the trough amid the rancid political-cultural milieu of No 10, its backers and manipulators, who see any crisis, no matter how dire or tragic, as an opportunity to clean up, these marvellous captains of free enterprise yet making their most extraneous profits by shaking the state’s magic money tree with the full abetment of the incumbent government.
Who profit, financially, politically, optically, from creating poverty. Hence we have the sickening spectacle of councillors, mayors, even MPs smiling for the camera at their nearest foodbank, the desperate need for which is long, long known to stem from the laws, cuts and poor governance by said MPs, while they blame the poor (including nurses and firefighters) for being poor (see 30p Lee, Brendan Clarke-Smith) and never themselves. That Miriam Cates’ ‘Foodbank’ app, which profited her by charging charities to use it, preceded her election to Parliament may still have been the kind of entrepreneurialism that boosted her prospects with the Conservatives.
Creating poverty
So the virtue in this unvirtuous circle isn’t in charity alleviating suffering; it is creating enough poverty to make the need for foodbanks – the creation and existence of them being, as Jacob Rees-Mogg feels, ‘uplifting’.
But isn’t he right in a way, how many folks ‘give’ less to benefit the receiver but to please themselves for their beneficence? Indeed can we expect anyone to do anything for nothing these days? So many YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokkers, influencers, draw so much adulation for ‘look at me, so caring’ stunts brandishing bucks at the homeless or paying the shopping of people who ‘look’ poor, for the millions of ‘likes’, clicks, and advertising lucre. Many say this is just the worst kind of exploitative, cynical, self-regarding crap.
Stunt philanthropy
But without the kudos, the adulation, actually the money, would the needy have got anything at all? ‘Stunt philanthropy’may beto some the tawdriest exercise inself-promotion – but isn’t all philanthropy actually ‘stunt philanthropy’? Don’t charities need to be run by the brightest and best and for them to be renumerated as such? Or if a wealthy do-gooder couldn’t put their name to their work – ‘why not? I paid for it’ – would they bother at all?
US steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was a Scot who actually believed in the rich paying tax because he knew they’d stump up nary a dime otherwise, and gave a colossal amount of his own wealth away to good ends, one example over a century later being New York’s iconic Carnegie Hall. Against that is the ever-diminishing list of sites named after the ‘philanthropic’ 18th century slave-trader Edward Colston, who donated so much to ‘give something back’ for having taken away the freedom, and lives, of so many.
There’s nothing new about people getting off on the idea of their own largesse. I remember as a kid reading Tintin’s Flight 714 when Captain Haddock cries in admiration of his own beneficence about slipping $5 to a supposedly homeless dude (actually a billionaire, who’s ultimately revealed to be a complete sociopath) for food. But this humbling story of selflessness was at least only told to himself, in his own head. He didn’t get a new car out of it. All he got was one ‘like’, in his head, before he tripped over a pot plant. At least he only hurt himself.
