Camila Batmanghelidjh: the rise and fall of the ‘Pied Piper of Peckham’

For years she was lauded by pop stars and prime ministers as an ‘angel’ helping the children in most need, but then her star fell in the most crushing way among allegations of abuse and financial mismanagement. Cleared of all accusations, Camila Batmanghelidjh never fully recovered and here, Eleanor Mills, who had worked with her and was her friend, explains the sadness at the end of her life

A friend to the less fortunate: Kids Company founder Camila Batmanghelidjh will hopefully be remembered for the good she did in service of the UK’s youth (Shutterstock)

Camila Batmanghelidjh had a special, magic charisma. That elusive quality that makes anything seem possible. “I worked for her for 12 years,” says one of her former assistants. “I sat outside her office and I would see real hard nuts go in there, CEOs, rockstars, captains of industry, top politicians. They’d go in looking all tough and come out melted, turned to jelly by her love and power, saying they had just had the most amazing conversation of their lives; that they had talked about their childhood in a way they never had before. That they’d written Kids Company a huge cheque, wanted to help, they’d be raving about how we were going to do a huge project. I’d take them out for a coffee afterwards and try to decode what had happened inside.”

The “inside” referred to is Camila’s office at Kids Company HQ in Blackfriars. I’d been there myself a few times, once with my own young children. It was an Aladdin’s cave, a grotto of wonder and delight, filled with toys and colouring pens, with bright rich colours and rugs, a bit of an old tree trunk growing in the middle of it like the Faraway Tree. There was a tent, games and sweets. I remember thinking that, if I was a traumatised kid and I’d ended up in this magical, warm, safe, colourful haven, I would have thought that I had died and gone to heaven.

And there weaving the web, was Camila – more impresario than charity boss. A visionary charismatic – larger than life in every way – physically because of the endocrine illness that had afflicted her whole life, swaddled in colourful lengths of material, long dangly earrings, slightly Iranian-inflected posh English – all heart and love. My kids adored her – they loved the freedom she gave them to explore her domain, “unlike most grown-ups” was their conclusion. She fed them sweets and let them crawl around her den. It didn’t matter that it was a Sunday, Camila was still at work; she was always at work, having trained as a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic in London, the kids, their needs, how she could help was as she put it: “her vocation”.