When Britain entered its first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, many found comfort in evoking the British wartime spirit. A timely hero emerged – Captain Tom Moore, a WWII veteran who walked up and down his garden to raise money for frontline nurses. But when the fundraising switched to a new charity, did anyone think to check where was the money was going?
Further reading
This episode relied on the Charity Commission’s report into the Captain Tom Foundation. You can watch Piers Morgan’s interview with the Ingram-Moores on his YouTube channel.
We also drew on contemporary reporting in a range of news outlets, including the BBC, Radio Times, Independent, Guardian, Daily Mail, Civil Society, and an interview with Hannah Ingram-Moore by David James Smith in The Times.
For more on warm glow theory, see James Andreoni’s paper Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving, and Dean Karlan and Daniel Wood’s paper The Effect of Effectiveness. For more on the use of metaphors in relation to pandemics, see Not Soldiers but Fire-fighters, a paper by Elena Semino in the journal Health Communication.