'Unfortunately, corruption is rooted in our culture in Kenya...'

It seems to be taking hold here too, it's just expressed rather differently.

The allegations against Dame Ann were made in 2020 shortly after she caught a self-employed cleaner stealing cash from her handbag. She told the woman, who was from the same Kenyan ethnic group as most of the six other complainants, to leave the castle immediately, but didn't report her to police.

'I made a massive mistake,' Dame Ann says. 'If I'd called the police, things might have been very different.'

Oh, sadly, I rather doubt it. You're making a big assumption there that the police only concentrate on determining whether a law has been broken. 

The first Dame Ann knew she was being investigated was in 2020 when one of her former students, who is now an aviation engineer, told her she had received a call from a detective. 'He was asking strange questions about me: Was I bad to her? Did I feed her? Did I allow her to leave the house? She told him he was being ridiculous and that I had only ever taken care of her.

'The detective didn't want to talk to her after that.'

Of course he didn't. The police no longer investigate all the facts and then determine which line to follow - that's the realm of tv shows. These day, and especially in Scotland, they start from a conclusion (slavery!)  and seek evidence to prove it. 

Many of the young men and women who were helped by the Gloag Foundation were keen to vouch for the woman who made such a difference to their lives.

'I know some of these people and believe they colluded to either get citizenship in the UK or money from Ann.

'Unfortunately, corruption is rooted in our culture in Kenya. I think the accusers probably thought she would want to settle because of the damage to her reputation, but Ann is strong.'

And it's a good thing that she is. Most people wouldn't have held out under such pressure. 

But the investigation continued with officers from the human trafficking unit interviewing students past and present, as well as Peter's carers, her secretary and staff.

'If someone makes an accusation like that, I understand it's their duty to investigate. I'm totally comfortable with that but, what I struggle with, is they completely disregarded the evidence of anybody who was positive about me.'

That's because you have a view of how the police used to act that is out of whack with the way they now act.  

Dame Ann was getting in her car to go on holiday last month when the Crown Office made public its decision, a year-and-half after she was charged.

It probably took a day, if that, to read the 'evidence' put to the Procurator Fiscal and realise this wasn't going anywhere! The other 546 days were no doubt spent trying to find someone to take responsibility for the decision. 

'It's not for me to tell the Home Office what to do but the law needs to be looked at or, at least, some of the wording on their website should be changed. This could be an epidemic coming down the line.'

No doubt. No doubt at all.  

Since the allegations were made Dame Ann has not returned to Kenya and the scholarship program has been suspended. She says she will take 'at least six months' to review what she does for charity in the future.

It should be 'nothing'.  

And Why Does That Matter?

No, this is the new definition of 'not welcome', no-one's actively blocking them... 

“Tennis,” a head coach from a prestigious club in Surrey casually remarked to me, “will never have a Marcus Rashford.”

The throwaway comment was made at a sparsely attended coaching forum on diversity in tennis in 2022. Less than six months later, I was at Surrey’s under-9 girls’ county cup with nine-year-old Sabein Weldegebriel, whose mother is from Ethiopia. I coach her in a park next to a south London council estate. Sabein’s success at getting to county level should give me hope that the head coach was wrong, but having been in this sport for 20 years, it is hard for me not to agree with him.

Perhaps instead of asking yourself 'Is he right or wrong?' you should maybe ask yourself 'Why should the colour of a person's skin matter more than whether or not they are a good player?' Chris...

Because the costs of becoming a professional tennis player are prohibitive to most kids, and the tennis establishment does very little to nurture talent in the way sports like football do.

Is this something charity could do instead? Yes, Reader, it is...and it's doing that.  

Sabein has had 100 hours of unpaid lessons with me over the past 12 months. We spotted her talent straight away when she came to G Tennis (grassroots tennis) about four years ago. A local charity that supports single parents, the Cheer Trust paid for initial group sessions, but the rest G Tennis has provided for free.

So what's the beef, Chris? 

DEI Has The Charitable Sector In Its Sights Now...

Charities are hiring staff with “privilege rather than potential”, according to the author of a report highlighting the stark class divide in the sector. Working-class people are less likely to be hired by charities than by employers in the public and private sectors, said the EY Foundation, which supports young people from low-income backgrounds to progress in professional roles.

The fact that charity worker can now be considered a 'professional role' in the first place is a sign of how far the industry has fallen, but no-one seems to want to point this out.  

Working-class people also find it harder to climb the career ladder inside charitable organisations, with the report highlighting how charity chief executives are twice as likely as the wider population to have gone to private school, rising to three times as likely for the biggest charities.

Duncan Exley, the author of the report, said charities were missing out when teams hired within their own social circles and class bubbles, which the research showed tended to skew towards the most affluent third of people.

They've become something so far from their origins that we probably need a new term for them. 'Charity' conjures up an image of grey haired retireees baking cakes to raise money for a small local issue and that's so far from the truth of what the largest are like that they are now targets for the rapacious DEI movement. 

One issue identified was that most charities were not even tracking their own progress on how many working-class employees they had and which roles they held. Of the 100 charities studied in one piece of independent research that went into the report, only one reported on the social class of its staff members.

And as a result, they must now spend the money they receive in donations for their cause on the kind of insane overheads that have crippled all other industry. 

Exley, who is the author of The End of Aspiration? Social Mobility and Our Children’s Fading Prospects, said there were endless hurdles for working-class people in the sector. These include a lack of progression from volunteering to a salaried job, having nobody to advocate professionally for them, and a lack of access to London where most large charities are based. Furthermore, he said it was simply not widely known among working-class young people that it was possible to have a well-paid career in the charity sector.

There's a real problem. It shouldn't be.