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It does seem a bit convenient. And the one thing this definitely proves is that the country's treatment of the most vulnerable is abysmal: it must be if government is (well, was) handing out millions of pounds of funding in cash to charities to pick up the pieces.
I can't say why the sources didn't speak out before. It can happen for a number of reasons though. It could be as simple as that nobody really bothered to ask them before because nobody was investigating Kid's Company. Investigative journalism is hard work, it requires persistence, research, gaining the trust of sources, persuading them to talk to you. It's harder if the culture of the organisation or other factors discourage speaking out.
On the salaries thing, if you're a charity and you're given a lump of cash and you're given it with conditions it's restricted income and you have to follow those conditions, if you don't your trustees are in breach of trust. I wouldn't be surprised if that alone could have got them in trouble with the Charities Commission if it hadn't been wound up (but my knowledge of such things is superficial).
But to be fair some of the blame for this does come back to government, because they were effectively treating a charity like a quango, asking it to spend millions of pounds of government money, but without the level of accountability that would normally come with that...
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Fox
It's all too coincidental that these stories are coming out when the ones with the purse strings no longer want to pay out. I can't see it as anything else but a ruse to silence one of the biggest critics of this country's treatment of the most vulnerable.
The inside sources from the Spectator article worked there over 7 years ago, why didn't they speak up then? Out of the 650 that have just lost their jobs, how many of those are critical of they way things were run (you can't count the ones who had a camera shoved in their face they day they were shit canned)?
They never kept the fact that they needed the money to pay salaries a secret. They have emails explicitly saying "we need this money now or we can't pay our staff" with responses to say "wait, no, you can't do that".
I've still to see any evidence of " financial irregularities". There have been independent audits over the last 19 years. The government grants were paid quarterly which each payment not released until they were happy with how the previous amount had been used.
I'm glad you agree on the other points and we're clearly not going to see eye to eye on the fucking horrendous way this has been handled.