If Damian Aspinall thought that appointing Carrie Johnson as the communications chief of his wildlife charities would have the money rolling in, he has been proved sadly mistaken. His much-publicised campaign to return elephants to the wild – launched on Carrie’s watch – is still embarrassingly £750,000 short of its £1m target, having added just £358 in donations since last August.
From the outset, the plan to dispatch 13 elephants currently in captivity at Aspinall’s Howlett’s Wildlife Park in Kent on a 4,400-mile flight to Kenya has been controversial. David Magner, the herd’s former keeper, was quick to brand it a “ridiculous” idea, warning that the elephants – “too used” to being in captivity – were being flown to their certain deaths.
Meanwhile, the prime minister’s wife faces a further public relations challenge, with the Charity Commission telling me that its regulatory inquiries into the running of The Aspinall Foundation and The Howletts Wild Animal Trust are ongoing. Carrie started working for The Aspinall Foundation in early 2021 and the commission’s drawn-out investigation pre-dates her time in Aspinall’s employ.
The commission first began looking at the charities in November 2019 as a “regulatory compliance case”, which progressed in July 2020 to “examining the charity over concerns about the management of conflicts of interest and related party transactions”, and in March 2021 it escalated to “a formal regulatory inquiry”.
Quite how Carrie finds the time to work for Aspinall, what with the parties and “strategy meetings” she has to attend in Downing Street, I have no idea.
Carrie faces a PR challenge
There is an ongoing inquiry into the running of The Aspinall Foundation, who Carrie works for when she's not organising “strategy meetings” in Downing Street
