Captain Tom Moore’s daughter shocks with controversial TV interview as friends and neighbors claim he would be upset.

As sorry-not-sorry apologies go, the one delivered up by Hannah Ingram-Moore on television last week was a jaw-dropping stonker indeed.

Mrs Ingram-Moore, readers will recall, is the daughter of the late Captain Sir Tom Moore, who managed to raise an impressive £38.9 million for NHS Covid charities by walking 100 laps of his Bedfordshire garden during the global pandemic to mark his centenary.

However, unlike her father who quickly became a national treasure and was later knighted by the Queen, his daughter’s reputation has faced challenges since his passing four years ago.

In November last year, following a two-and-a-half year statutory inquiry, the Charity Commission strongly criticized the way Hannah and her husband Colin, a chartered accountant, personally ‘significantly’ benefited from their affiliation with the high-profile charity The Captain Tom Foundation.

Found to have committed ‘serious and repeated’ instances of misconduct, mismanagement and failures of integrity, most damning of all, the Commission concluded, the public had been ‘misled’ when buying items including books and limited edition bottles of Captain Tom gin, not realising they were lining the Ingram-Moores’ pockets.

Viewers could have been forgiven, then, for thinking that the 54-year-old mother-of-two was going to make a fulsome apology when she appeared on BBC Breakfast and ITV’s Good Morning Britain to talk about the scandal last week.

What they got, however, was the kind of banal platitude favoured by spin doctors and PR gurus, followed – with yet more gobsmacking nerve – by a cynical plug for yet another cash-spinning venture linked to her famous father. A trilogy of self-published books, no less!

‘I’m sorry they feel misled. I genuinely am. But there was never any attempt to mislead and if there was any misleading it wasn’t our doing,’ Mrs Ingram-Moore told the BBC.

There was, she said, ‘nothing dishonest about what happened’. She was the one who had been ‘used’, not members of the public.

Most extraordinary of all was the answer she gave when asked on ITV if she felt any shame for her actions.

‘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.’

Her stubborn denials were immediately rebutted by the Charity Commission which underlined its findings that the couple ‘blurred the boundaries between their private interests and those of the charity’.

It says the actions of the couple, who are now disqualified from acting as charity trustees, have damaged public trust.

Given the ongoing furore, some may well be wondering why on earth unrepentant Mrs Ingram-Moore thought it would be a good idea to speak on the matter at all.

The answer undoubtedly lies in the shameless plug she gave for her latest business venture as an author.

It comes as no surprise that her first self-published book, released on Amazon last week, is about coping with the death of her father.

Priced at £8.99 – 79p for the Kindle version – Grief: Public Face, Private Loss is trumpeted as ‘a compassionate guide to ease loneliness’ with ‘insights from my personal journey’. But it is also plainly an attempt to blame others for her own public downfall.

‘There was a palpable sense of the truth being manipulated for the benefit of others,’ she writes, without a shred of irony, of the aftermath of her father’s death.

‘This manipulation profoundly affected my family’s grief and my own. Amid this turmoil, at my core, I remained simply a daughter grieving the loss of her father.’

She makes no mention of the fact that the day before her father died, she and her husband signed on as trustees of the Captain Tom Foundation. Nor does she address the criticism she has faced for making money out of her father’s name.

The 141-page work opens with a description of Sir Tom on his deathbed: ‘The man who had been like the Yeoman Warder in the Tower of London, the protector who kept everything in our family running, was leaving us,’ she writes in syrupy prose.

‘The world was preparing to mourn Captain Sir Tom, a figure of hope and resilience, but I was losing my father. My grief was private, personal, and raw, yet it was on the verge of becoming public. Soon our intimate sorrow would intersect with a collective loss that would be shared by millions.’

Nor is her late mother spared from her pen. Mrs Ingram-Moore lifts the lid on how her father struggled to cope as his second wife Pamela, Hannah’s mother, battled a degenerative brain disease before her death in 2006.

‘Every morning, my father would call, his voice heavy with distress as he described the events from the day before. These conversations, raw and heart-wrenching, often ended in tears, his and mine. This from a man I had rarely, if ever, seen cry before.’

Mrs Ingram-Moore’s self-serving account is just the beginning of what she hopes will be a new career as a writer.

There are at least two more tomes in the pipeline – a book called Transform Your Morning In 10 Minutes: Simple Rituals for a Productive Day, as well as an autobiography.

Her latest business venture comes as no surprise to those who have worked with the couple.

One PR who spoke to the Mail said: ‘They were always coming up with some way to make cash. It was definitely all about how they could use this to set themselves up. That was their mindset. They were financially obsessed.

‘They talked about a Captain Tom movie and who would play them. They really thought they were the pride of Britain.

‘I remember going on holiday and getting a text from Hannah asking, ‘Why aren’t we at the James Bond premiere?’

‘Maybe a movie will be made one day – but about what a cock-up this all was.’

Indeed, if Mrs Ingram-Moore plans to write about her own life, then she obstinately refuses to accept responsibility for what happened to her father’s charity in the wake of his death in February 2021.

The Captain Tom Foundation charity was incorporated in May 2020, just days after the Second World War veteran’s original Just Giving fundraiser ended. All the money he raised – nearly £39million – went to NHS Charities Together.

During the registration process, the charity confirmed that it would be independent from Captain’s Tom family and that there were no plans for any family members to benefit from it.

But a month earlier, before Sir Tom had even finished his charity walk, the Ingram-Moores had set up a private company, Club Nook Ltd, to manage his commercial and intellectual property interests. The business-minded couple also registered the trademarks ‘Captain Tom’ and ‘Walk With Tom’, planning to license them out.

It was into this company that the £1.47million three-book advance was paid by publishing giant Penguin the following month – on the understanding that a contribution would made to charity.

In the preface to his book, Captain Tom wrote: ‘Astonishingly at my age with the offer to write this memoir I have also been given the chance to raise even more money for the charitable foundation now established in my name…’

In the end, however, only £18,000 – £1 a copy from sales of the first book – went to the charity.

In 2022 the Ingram-Moores refused a request by the Charity Commission to ‘honour the commitment’ made by Sir Tom in his foreword. They twice asked to ‘rectify matters by making a donation to the charity’ but declined.

Mrs Ingram-Moore said this week that, after fees were taken into account, the family made around £800,000 from the book deal. Some of that payment, she insisted, went to the charity but she refused to say how much.

‘I don’t think it’s helpful now for me to put another number out,’ she told the BBC. ‘Because that’s the number everyone will talk about. There is nothing dishonest about what happened.’

She argued that her father ‘wanted us to benefit’ and wanted the cash to go to the family.

‘It was his money,’ she said.

Not so, says the Charity Commission. A spokesman told the Mail: ‘Charity law is very clear – charity trustees cannot misuse their position to gain personally.

‘Our rigorous investigation found repeated instances where Hannah and Colin Ingram-Moore’s actions blurred the boundaries between their private interests and those of the charity. We stand by the findings of the inquiry, which are based on robust evidence.’

Other serious criticisms by the Government watchdog of Mrs Ingram-Moore concerned the £150,000 salary she initially demanded – and was refused – when she became CEO of the Captain Tom Foundation and the £18,000 she received for judging the Virgin Media O2 Captain Tom Foundation Connector Awards in 2021 while a mere £2,000 was paid to her father’s charity.

The disgraced businesswoman makes no mention of any of this when she writes of the aftermath of her father’s death.

There is nothing, either, about the £200,000 ‘Captain Tom’ luxury spa she and her husband built for themselves in the garden of their £2million home – under the guise that it was for the foundation – and were forced to tear down last year by planning authorities.

Indeed, her ‘biggest regret’, Mrs Ingram-Moore said last week, was not trying to cash in on her father’s fame, but setting up a charity in the first place.

‘In hindsight we didn’t need to do that,’ she told the BBC. ‘It didn’t need to be set up as a charity. We could have continued that legacy without it. Because what it’s done is all but completely derail our lives.’

What is clear is that financially shrewd Mrs Ingram-Moore always had her eye on the business opportunities her father’s fame would bring.

The biggest irony of all, of course, is that they had no need of it.

Before this sorry saga began, she and her husband were wealthy in their own right.

Describing herself on her website as one of the UK’s most successful businesswomen, she has previously worked for companies including Fortnum & Mason and The Gap. She still offers her services as a ‘brand marketing coach’ who helps clients to ‘Be Moore Remarkable’ but said this week that the scandal which has engulfed her has seen much of her business consultancy work dry up.

Latest accounts for Club Nook filed with Companies House suggest that the Ingram-Moores’ financial fortunes have also collapsed. It has net current assets of just £149. Last year this figure stood at £336,300.

The couple’s seven-bedroom Grade II-listed home in the Bedfordshire village of Marston Moretaine is also for sale. It boasts a detached coach house, a 3.4-acre garden and even a moat. In January, the asking price was slashed from £2.25million to £2million.

Several villagers said last week that they were ‘sickened and disgusted’ by news of Mrs Ingram-Moore’s latest money-making venture.

‘I’m appalled she’s still going after publicity for another book,’ said 32-year-old Stacey Fowler. ‘If she does sell any I’d like to think she might use the money to pay back what she should have paid into the Captain Tom Foundation.

‘There hasn’t been any transparency about where funds were going when so many people had supported the Foundation. She’s tarnished her father’s reputation.’

Retired kiln worker Shannon Pasfield said: ‘She won’t get any support from the village until she leaves us in peace. Her father was a decent chap who won the hearts and souls of the nation. He’d be turning in his grave if he thought she was still in the market for more publicity.’

What is now as clear as day is the Ingram-Moores’ shameful belief that once Sir Tom had raised his millions for the NHS, they had the right to share in his lucrative legacy.

In this, of course, they were horribly mistaken.

The idea of making personal gains from one of the most extraordinary outpourings of public goodwill in British history is one which has left a bitter legacy of its own.