The first step towards restoring the National Trust

The National Trust is a subject in Charles Moore’s Spectator ‘Notes’ column this week:

‘It is poetically fitting that the resignation of the chairman of the National Trust, Tim Parker, was announced on the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. The collective mistakes that have so damaged the Trust’s reputation were bound up in the rush of many institutions to ‘take the knee’, metaphorically and literally.

Immensely delicate questions about how best to study the connections of Trust properties with slavery and (ill-chosen word) ‘colonialism’ were rushed and politicised. The view inevitably spread that the Trust now bears an animus towards the past whose glorious buildings and landscapes it is supposed to protect so that millions may enjoy them.

That animus is clearly present in the writings of the head of the Colonial Countryside Project, Professor Corinne Fowler, but probably not in Mr Parker himself. His problem was a lack of leadership and of deep knowledge of the Trust’s history and essential purposes. He was therefore vulnerable to the Black Lives Matter ambush.

It has taken a huge amount of protest from the Trust’s real friends and the campaigning of the new organisation, Restore Trust, to start putting things right. Mr Parker’s departure is part of that.

The tragedy is that the National Trust was, until recently, capable of reconciling the radical with the conservative — the former tending to care more about the recreation of the masses, the latter about the heritage of the houses, gardens and estates themselves, but both accepting the link between the two. That is the Trust that needs restoring.’

Read the article on the Spectator website here.