She was widely praised for restoring the image of the charity, but did not escape without a controversy at her departure.
Its image of distributing charity and having borne the brunt of the Al Aqsa intifada and, by contrast, Fatah's almost surreal disorganization was just part of the story.
But that image of benign charity was thrown into question this week when the Bush administration shut the group's offices, saying it was a fund-raising front for Hamas, a militant Palestinian group.
As well as presenting Mary, Queen Of Shops, earlier this year she hosted a sister show, Mary, Queen Of Charity Shops, which saw her transforming the image of UK charity shops from being the poorer cousins of the high street into must-stop shops.
"We are hearing of younger and younger children being conscious of their body image," says Mary George of charity Beat.
In the 1980s his rumoured ties to the criminal underworld, which he denied in a newspaper interview, inspired the gangster nickname of "Sia O .In contrast, Princess Sirindhorn, his sister, enjoys a saintly image as a patron of charity.
The old image of everything in a charity shop being battered and grubby is so not the case here – everything is clean and bright".
In his review of A. B. Yehoshua's novel "The Retrospective" (March 31), Robert Pinsky traces the image of "Caritas Romana" (Roman Charity) back to the Roman story of the prisoner Cimon, sentenced to death by starvation and saved by his daughter, who surreptitiously breast-fed him.
Americans embraced that image of immigration as a form of charity.
