Some simple rules when it comes to doling out millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money

Don’t give public money to an organisation led by someone who:

(1) despite having attended a traditional British girls boarding school and a good university, dresses like a clown

(2) is named after a comic-book hero.

(3) makes boastful claims about themselves, e.g. ‘I’ve got so much energy, it’s going to fry me like an egg’ – it suggests a bloated ego.

(4) who talks absolute bollocks, e.g. ‘We make the mistake of thinking that only parents can love a child. This is wrong. The human species can love a child.’ This sort of vaporous nonsense suggests a lack of mental clarity.

(5) who is morbidly obese (unless they’re running a charity for the morbidly obese) – it suggests a lack of self-control.

(6) who is worshipped by David Cameron, Boris Johnson AND Alan Yentob. Being hero-worshipped by the great and the good (?) usually ends in tears. Or court.

(7) who awards themselves a £90,000 a year salary for being a saint. Whatever happened to doing good being its own reward?

I’m not saying Kids Company hasn’t done a lot of good work. And I’m not saying Camila Batmanghelidjh has done anything wrong (okay, she used part of a recent government grant to pay staff – a purpose for which it was not intended – but she may well have been confused regarding the conditions of the payment). What I am saying is that we really must stop government - local or national - dishing out our money to charities: which people or charities we donate our money to should be our affair, and ours alone.