Captain Sir Tom Moore’s daughter has called the ‘negative headlines’ about her ‘lies’ as she defended the £200,000 spa built in his memory.
Appearing on Good Morning Britain, Hannah Ingram Moore also doubled down and said she ‘did nothing wrong’ after denying she took £1.5million from the family’s charity.
The World War Two veteran shot to fame while raising £38.9million for NHS charities by walking laps around is Bedfordshire home.
After his soaring popularity, his daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore and her husband launched their own charity – the Captain Tom Foundation.
Hannah said Captain Tom ‘decided’ what happened to the £1,500,000 advance payment on a book deal with Penguin.
The veteran’s daughter was grilled by interviewer Kate Garraway, who asked: ‘So he wanted the jacuzzi? That is what you are getting at.
‘From the outside it looks like you and your family wanted that.’
Hannah then shot back, saying: ‘Yes, but charity money did not pay for the building or the hot tub. It was our personal money on our land.’
But only £18,000 – £1 a copy from sales of the first book – went to the charity, while the Ingram-Moores kept around £800,000 for themselves.
Asked by TV Judge Rob Rinder if she had ‘any shame’ as a result of the scandal, Hannah said: ‘When I look back at the last five years, we know that we own the truth and what I can’t do is sit here and persuade everyone to believe our reality.
‘There was no wilful mismanagement, no will to do anything but support the legacy.’
She did however accept it was an ‘error’ that the Foundation’s name appeared in the planning application for the family’s spa complex.
Hannah and her husband were ultimately ordered to tear down the luxury spa due to its ‘unauthorised’ C-shape building which contained a pool.
At the very beginning of the tense TV exchange, Captain Tom’s daughter slammed the reams of negative publicity directed towards her as ‘lies’.
She said: ‘As those negative headlines swirled and we lost any sense of the truth.
‘I saw the lie being much more interesting than the truth sat behind it.’
Hannah also came to blows with the ITV presenters over her £18,000 salary as a judge for the Captain Tom Foundation Connector Award between 2020 and 2021.
The charity itself only received £2,000 from the agreement.
Sir Tom’s daughter however insisted this morning that ‘doing the judging takes a lot of time.’
She added it was her idea for the charity to receive any money in the first place.
More to follow.
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