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Tom Hannah Moore Getty.jpg

The Captain Tom Scandal Is The Most British of Scams

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Politics | October 13, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Politics | October 13, 2023 |

Tom Hannah Moore Getty.jpg

During the great COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, I think it’s safe to say that we all kind of lost our minds. Amid the isolation, rising death toll, and endless government ineptitude, we desperately grasped anything that gave us a semblance of hope. We banged pots and pans. Celebrities did John Lennon sing-alongs. Sourdough starters sprung up across the land. On 6 April 2020, at the age of 99, one man decided to raise some money for the NHS as part of his upcoming 100th birthday celebrations. He became a British hero, a sign of hope in dark times. Now, two and a half years since his passing, his legacy is tarnished by good old-fashioned British greed and a growing sense of hindsight regarding something that should never have been turned into a cutesy inspirational ad.

Captain Tom Moore, a former British Army officer, began to walk 100 lengths of his garden in the hope of raising around £1,000. It didn’t take long for the sweet gesture to go viral, in large part helped by his media-savvy daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore. Soon, contributions came rolling in, with over £30 million raised in less than a month. Then things got weird. He landed a number-one hit song alongside Michael Ball. He received a knighthood. People made portraits of him with balloons, crochet, and foot paintings. He was turned into drone art. Piers Morgan interviewed him. Buses and trains were named after him. We were all told to be more like Captain Tom. In December, as most of us were still in lockdown, he and his family took a holiday to Barbados, with British Airways paying for his flight. When he died on 2nd February of the following year (of COVID-19 and pneumonia), the nation mourned. A change.org petition calling for Moore to receive a state funeral received almost 200,000 signatures. There were calls for him to receive statues. The whole thing became extremely surreal. The moment I saw someone selling a Captain Tom print miniskirt on Redbubble was when I wondered if I’d slipped into the Twilight Zone.

I don’t say this in smarmy hindsight or to prove anything, but there was always something about this story that made me uneasy. Much in the same way that I abhor stories of kids starting lemonade stands to pay for growing medical bills, I didn’t particularly appreciate how the authorities who exacerbated the pandemic through government ineptitude and full-on cruelty tried to appropriate a nonagenarian’s good deed. I felt uncomfortable with Boris Johnson and Piers Morgan and all the usual suspects cheering on the necessity of fundraising for our national health service, which had been gutted out repeatedly by Tory rule. This was not to denigrate Captain Moore himself, who seemed like a perfectly pleasant individual hoping to keep up his and everyone else’s spirits during tough times. It was more that our eager hunt for a lone hero in the face of abject horror without confronting the institutional failings that made our pain so much worse felt like we were all missing the forest for the trees.

Following Moore’s death, my suspicion over the mutating of his inherently optimistic message grew ever larger. Hannah Ingram-Moore went to work to turn her father’s legacy into an endless money-maker for herself. The Captain Tom Foundation was established in June 2020, with the aim of raising money for organisations supporting the elderly in the UK (this was separate from Moore’s own NHS charitable work.) In March 2021, the charity proposed employing Hannah on a salary of £60,000 per annum for three days a week and later submitted a revised proposal to appoint her as full time CEO on a salary of £100,000. This was rejected by the Charity Commission for England and Wales in July 2021 as ‘neither reasonable nor justifiable.’ However, they permitted the charity to appoint Ingram-Moore as the interim CEO on a salary of £85,000 per year, on a rolling contract for a maximum of nine months.

In its first year of operation, the Captain Tom Foundation spent £240,000 on management and fundraising costs, while just £160,000 was given away in charitable grants. Hannah Ingram-Moore started making personal appearances on behalf of the foundation, with the money going towards herself and her family company rather than the charity. In July 2023, the Ingram-Moores were ordered to demolish an unauthorised spa building at their home. The spa, which they named ‘the Captain Tom Foundation Building’, was supposedly intended for use by the charity, according to the family, yet independent trustees for the foundation said they hadn’t been aware of planning permission sought by the Ingram-Moores in the foundation’s name.

This month, the Ingram-Moore family made a faux-teary appearance on Piers Morgan’s show to admit that they had kept around £800,000 from sales of books that Captain Moore had written. Hannah Ingram-Moore said her father had wanted them to keep the profits. The charity stopped taking donations in July pending an investigation into its allegedly dodgy dealings.

The whole thing is scammy from snout to tail, an astonishing display of arrogance and greed from a family that shoehorned its way into the spotlight via a 99-year-old man’s charitable deeds. It cannot help but make you think twice about that charity walk, and the image of a frail elderly man only weeks away from 100 shuffling back and forth in his garden with his walker. Indeed, Captain Moore didn’t call himself ‘Captain Tom.’ Hannah did that for the PR blitz, by her own admission. The whole thing starts to seem more like a money-maker for her than anything else. Do it for Captain Tom, just don’t check where the money’s actually going. This is nothing new in the world of charities, alas. Many experts in the field have noted how horribly common it is for figures, particularly celebrities, to set up foundations that function as convenient tax breaks more effectively than as displays of altruism. We’re also painfully used to the ways that the façade of charitable kindness is used to conceal all manner of abuses and wrongdoings. Good charities suffer as a result of the skepticism this causes.

The Captain Tom story has become that most scathing exemplification of the lockdown-induced mania that brought out the absolute worst in the powers that be: Force an old man to be the untouchable face of heroism in the middle of a pandemic that the government seemed utterly uninterested in preventing (and almost giddy at the prospect of thousand of dead elderly residents); turn him into a brand; prey on people’s optimism and hunger for light; profit until it’s too embarrassing to continue doing so; then claim it’s what the dead man wanted all along. All that’s missing to make it even more British is a few digs at people on benefits. Perhaps this whole mess shouldn’t inspire us to be more pessimistic about good deeds and the people who work hard to help others. We need folks like that in our world, now more than ever. At the very least, however, I imagine we’ll be less speedy to spin it all into a range of merchandise.