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More charities need to clean up their act, and fast, or risk becoming social pariahs

The news that Oxfam employees have been behaving horrifically while working under the brief of helping the world’s most vulnerable rolled on this weekend, making excruciating reading. Simultaneously came the story that Brendan Cox, husband of the late Jo Cox MP, has quit two charities he set up in her memory after allegations of sexual assault were made public. He denies the claims though admits he “made mistakes” during his time at Save the Children. The two have been conflated by the professionally outraged and as a result charity workers are now on the precipice of social vilification.

Under the pretence of justice-seeking, the public and private sectors are being pitted against each other in today’s divided society, egged on by a culture of rivalry between “do gooders” and “hard workers”.

The collective “they” might say, “the lazy public-sector lot, who spend their time team-building when they’re not on holiday, and the rest of us grafting to prop up the economy.” But our pessimism towards those who are trying to fix society is far from helpful. Good people are easy targets for derision because if you claim to do good work it must mean you think you are better, or perfect, right? Wrong.

Those who work in the charity sector are easy to dislike because their efforts make us feel bad about the lack of our own. And we would do well to remember that, first of all, thousands of charity workers, working across the sector in various roles, devote their lives to literally saving the world from ourselves when the rest of us can’t be bothered.

Secondly, of course abuse of power under the guise of doing good is abhorrent and Professor Mary Beard’s empathy and “contextualising” of the alleged child abuse in Haiti is misplaced. If James Bulger’s killers had tough lives growing up, would I be more empathetic? No, I wouldn’t. I am, however, issuing a caution — not to tar all charity workers with the same brush, as more revelations in the sector doubtless come to the fore (which I am guessing they are about to).

It will be tempting. Public opinion is at a level of deep intolerance of the charity sector — the most recent case of widespread rot set in when Kids Company, the children’s charity founded by Camila Batmanghelidjh, collapsed in 2015 amid allegations of misspending public money and mismanagement.

And a word of advice to the charity sector: hold a mirror up to Caliban. Audit your working practices, tighten your ships, sack who you need to, clean up your PR. Be aware of how your work looks like to the outside world. You operate in a perceived “right on” bubble — and it could be about to burst.

It’s dawning on me how much I’ll miss my departing nanny

Our nanny has resigned — first- world problems, indeed. A decent wage for an experienced nanny seems to be £13 per hour in London, while a good nursery costs close to £100 a day. There’s not that much in it.

In fact, a woman who works full-time needs to earn more than £1,500 a month after tax, and before anything else, to be able to afford either. Until I had a child, paying to be able to work wasn’t a consideration, it was as if post-giving birth my job had morphed into a luxury item rather than a necessity.

Now our kind, patient, bright nanny who affords me such extravagance is off to find an office job, and I am bereft. She broke the news, and I hurried upstairs to “find something” and wept alone after realising I’d lost the one ingredient that stops the stew that is my life sticking to the bottom.

I didn’t realise that she had become part of our family until she told me that she wanted to leave.

The core-wrenching magnitude of losing her isn’t something my partner, or my friends without children, seem to quite get. My partner is quite happy to leave me with the extensive task of replacing her — signing up with agencies, writing the posts, replying, vetting the candidates, interviewing them, organising trial shifts.

I’ve become militant — first-round interviews conducted on Facetime — and if you have a piercing between your breasts, or answer the question, “what do you find most challenging about being a nanny?” with the reply; “bonding with the family”, it’s unlikely you’re the right candidate.

As I walk out of the door each morning I am so grateful to our nanny for picking up where I leave off. Loving my daughter like she is her own. I purposefully didn’t go in for attachment parenting — or so I thought.

The Duchess of Cambridge at the Baftas (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
The Duchess of Cambridge at the Baftas (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

* Consider for a moment the stupidity of lambasting the Duchess of Cambridge, as some have, for not wearing a black dress to support the #timesup cause at the Baftas on Sunday night. Sexual harassment may not be a political issue but a “woman” thing and, yes, some royal codes are outdated. But the black sash, matching shoes and a black bag, along with emeralds, which became the stone of choice for female stars at the Golden Globes, were sign enough for me that she is on our side.