The chairman of the trustees of the collapsed Kids Company charity, Alan Yentob has resigned his £183.000 job as creative director of the BBC, saying that the furore in the wake of the August collapse was proving a “serious distraction”.

Yentob was widely blamed for his part, as trustee’s chairman, in the financial failure of the charity, which had received £46 million in public funding. He was also hit by media allegations that he misused his power at the BBC, asking Newsnight to delay a critical report into the charity.

Founder and figurehead of Kids Company, Camila Batmanghelidjh has also had a kicking, with underwhelmed MPs on the public administration select committee, who grilled her and Yentob over the use of all the money finding her less persuasively colourful and charismatic than a “mesmerised” David Cameron reportedly did. “A non-stop spiel of psychobabble” and “a torrent of verbal ectoplasm” were some descriptions of her performance.