IIt’s sometimes easy to forget how quickly the phenomenon that was Captain Tom Moore exploded into the public domain in the early days of the pandemic lockdown. On April 6, 2020, he woke up as a completely anonymous 99-year-old, approaching his centenary. Later that day, he began his walk up and down the driveway for charity, using a Zimmer frame. His daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore sent out a press release and two weeks later Captain Tom Moore was world famous.

The veteran may have moved slowly on his daily walks around the home he shared with his daughter and her family, the Old Rectory in the Bedfordshire village of Marston Moretaine, but around him things were happening quickly.

On Day 18, when Tom was well over halfway to raising – through his own efforts, with the support of Hannah – just under £38.9 million for NHS Charities Together, Hannah and her husband, Colin Ingram-Moore, registered the Club Nook company. They began securing intellectual property rights in her father’s name for the company, but Tom Moore was not a director.

On the 29th – May 5, 2020 – Hannah had incorporated the charity Captain Tom Foundation. A week after that, she signed a three-book deal with Penguin on her father’s behalf, which we now know secured a £1.5m advance. The money went directly to Club Nook. Not a pound has ever been paid to the charity. On day 37, Hannah and Colin had just earned £1.4m.

When I traveled out to interview Hannah Ingram-Moore at her home in 2022, these stark facts, and many more besides, were still obscured – the Charity Commission inquiry had to invoke its statutory powers to extract the details of the arrangement from Penguin.

During our meeting, Hannah spoke volumes about the love they had felt from the public during that time, the love her father had inspired, and the love that would carry his legacy forward. I wanted to believe her—and believed she was sincere in her desire to do good in her father’s name.

I can’t pretend there were no doubts, but I never considered the extent of the blatant self-interest revealed by the Charity Commission report. It found “serious and repeated instances of misconduct and/or misconduct” by Hannah and her husband in relation to the Captain Tom Foundation, which, the commission said, had “damaged public trust and confidence” in the charity and in charities more generally.

They have now both been disqualified from serving or working with charities – Hannah for 10 years and Colin for eight years.

There were warning bells even in 2022. Club Nook’s first year accounts showed an unexplained income of just over £800,000. After our meeting I asked Hannah for an explanation and she told me, “I can confirm that Club Nook has not profited from branded merchandise/memorabilia, that Club Nook has not been paid by the Foundation for the use of its brands, and that Club Nook’s revenue has generated by other activities.”

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How then had it made £800,000? When I asked in a follow-up email what these “other activities” were, she did not respond. She was just as confused when it came to the salary she would receive as the foundation’s executive director. The Charity Commission makes clear that she initially expected a figure of £150,000 a year, but this was reduced and she ended up being paid much less.

The commission’s report goes into detail about a deal with a gin company and the blurred line between personal gain and charity. As it happened, I had asked Hannah about the gin and she told me that the company was run by a family friend in Yorkshire, someone her father was fond of. She suggested that she give him a helping hand by making an arrangement.

Hannah stopped communicating with me after our last exchanges in 2022. I have often invited her to comment on the allegations that have been made since then. She has said that her father wanted the family to benefit from the books he wrote, but that is not what he seemed to say in the prologue to the first book, Tomorrow will be a good daywhere he welcomed the book as an opportunity to “raise even more money for charity”. Nor was that what I was told by others who told me that Tom was not interested in money and expected everything to go to charity.

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Hannah’s observations of the love her father and her family felt from the public were tempered by negativity they had faced from some, especially on social media.

“We were innocent (when it started),” she told me. “We had no idea. We had only done this for love and for hope and to try to raise some money. We had never ever thought about a dark side. Never.”

They had developed resilience. A thick skin. She wasn’t quite sure why, but she had realized that some people expected her to be found out… “to find the story that maybe I took all the money, that might be it.”

That couldn’t be further from the truth, she insisted. “There have been many, many, many hours and a lot of money invested, which we would never get back. which we willingly gave.”

She attributed some of the negativity about her to suspicion of being a successful woman. But she would not be deterred. Her father had believed in the idea of ​​a charitable foundation, she said.

“We had a vision, we had a mission, we had a brand, but beyond that, it was him and after he died we realized we were kind of speechless. We had all this love and all this reach… and it’s what I’ve spent most of my time on is really defining who we are as a charity, how can we, with what we have, have the biggest, positive impact on society.”

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I would welcome the opportunity to ask Hannah how these feelings could be reconciled with the personal gain from the Penguin contract and how they could have a spa and pool building that they had built on the grounds of their home and then had to dismantle because it had been built without correct condition.

Hannah was full of plans when we met – none have happened yet and probably never will. There was the film about her father’s life – there was a first draft of the script and Michael Caine had been mentioned to play him. There was exclusive footage they had shot for a possible documentary, plans for an annual Captain Tom Day charity, and there was to be another book – Hannah’s autobiography for which she had already written six chapters.

It would be the human story, she told me, of being the daughter, going on that journey with her father and everything she had learned from both her parents (her mother, Pam, died in 2006, aged 71).

Hannah stopped and thought. “We’re not unbalanced, we’re fine,” she said. “Life can be difficult but I think we are super resilient. We were thrust into this and as a wife, mother, daughter, business leader, I had to take on the challenge.”

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There was another break. “Not always to perfection. I don’t always get it right. We’re not perfect, we do our best.”

In 2022, Hannah assured me that she wanted to be accountable to the public. It is perhaps a matter of sadness that in the end accountability has been forced upon them and has come from the external review of the Charity Commission.

It is also a matter of some regret that even now Hannah’s response to the commission’s findings is not remorse, but a reflection of how it has all affected her. She described the commission’s inquiry as a “shaking and debilitating ordeal” which had left the family feeling locked in “constant fear and mental anguish”.

A quote on her website, attributed to Hannah, described how she feels a “weight of responsibility to do the right thing, to not let people down and respond to the love and compassion that has come our way”.

What Captain Tom’s judgment would be on actions that seem to have deviated so far from his own ideals and values ​​we can only imagine.