We were interviewed by The Times before this year’s National Trust AGM.

The National Trust has been fending off attacks from an insurgent group of members ever since The Times published leaked documents revealing the charity planned to “dial down” its role as a “major national cultural institution” in a ten-year strategy to allegedly move away from being the custodian of the English country home.

Internal briefing documents outlined plans in 2020 to reduce opening times, put its collections into storage and hold fewer exhibitions at its properties because executives believed it offered an “outdated mansion experience … serving a loyal but dwindling audience”.

Since then a traditionalist group calling itself Restore Trust has attempted to use the annual general meeting to get its candidates elected to the 36-strong council, which holds the board of trustees to account, and get resolutions passed to alter policy.

The group had limited success in its first year, with three of its suggested council members elected in 2021. A resolution to provide defibrillators at every National Trust property was passed despite the board of trustees recommending members vote against it.

The following year the National Trust introduced a major reform to the voting system called the “quick vote”, which allows trust members to tick one box to vote for all the council candidates and resolutions recommended by the trustees, saving them time and effort reading each individual submission.

Since then all the candidates and resolutions backed by Restore Trust have failed to win a vote. Last year Restore Trust’s preferred candidates, including the former supreme court judge Lord Sumption, again fell short.

Cornelia Van der Poll, a co-founder of Restore Trust and a lecturer in ancient Greek at the University of Oxford, said the quick vote “dominates to such an extent that the voting at the AGM isn’t really meaningful any more”.

She added: “The voting has become a rubber-stamping exercise where the nominations committee gets to choose who will be in the council and huge block-voting swings behind those candidates and they get voted in almost automatically. I think we have a self-perpetuating oligarchy and the real loss is a loss of diversity of thought.”

Restore Trust argues the quick vote was introduced “without consultation” and increases bias in elections. Last year 46 per cent of all voting members used the quick vote for council elections and 41 per cent used it for votes on resolutions.

The insurgent group has been prevented from tabling a motion at this year’s AGM on Saturday, calling for members to be allowed to vote to abolish the trust’s “quick-vote” system, without the quick vote being used in the referendum.

The National Trust said the motion was rejected because at last year’s AGM a resolution to abolish the quick-vote system was defeated, with 60,327 (46.4 per cent) in favour of abolition and 69,715 (53.6 per cent) against it. However, Restore Trust said the vote should be held without the use of the quick-vote system; 41 per cent of votes against it came through the quick-vote system itself, as the trustees recommended it be defeated.

One of the resolutions the National Trust has allowed this year, and is recommending members vote for, is a motion to make 50 per cent of food in its cafes vegan and vegetarian as part of a commitment to reach net zero by 2030.

The National Trust said the Charities (National Trust) Order 2005 requires the council’s nominations committee to recommend to members which candidates best satisfy the council election criteria and which appointing bodies are best placed to appoint someone to assist the council in fulfilling its responsibilities. This could be done in several ways, including by putting an asterisk next to the names of the candidates or resolutions it supports, as members read through each proposal.

Van der Poll accused the trust’s leadership of pursuing “skewed and activist approaches” to history. Since 2021 her group and supporters have railed against the trust’s perceived lack of historical and curatorial rigour, its soul-searching about the role slavery played at some of its properties and their charge that Europe’s largest conservation charity, with more than five million members, has become too “woke”.

At the Labour Party conference this year, Hilary McGrady, director-general of the National Trust since 2018, said: “Seventy per cent of my staff and volunteers would be regarded as progressive activists, so I have a workforce of people who are really wanting to push on this.”

For people like Van der Poll, that was fuel to the fire. “We really just want the National Trust to do the job it was set up to do and do it properly and not veer off into political activism,” she said. “It should be about proper, thorough interpretation, conservation and presentation. It was pretty shocking that Hilary McGrady said 70 per cent of staff were activists. I don’t know if she thinks this is a good thing or a bad thing but it’s pretty alarming and I don’t think it’s true of the volunteers.”

Volunteers being given LGBT lanyards, the banning of trail hunting on its land and the introduction of bean bags, disco balls and modern art installations which resemble “‘a big pile of poo’’ have all served to keep the traditionalists’ hackles up. Restore Trust’s bugbears include the trust’s decision not to rebuild Clandon House in Surrey after the Palladian gem burnt to the ground in 2015 and the “dumbing-down” of Sudbury Hall, the fine Restoration house in Derbyshire, into the “Children’s Country House”.

“Sudbury Hall is being trivialised as a children’s playground and it’s completely inappropriate,” Van der Poll said. “A Charles II country house is not a space primarily for children and although they are welcome and we want them to take interest, it’s not a playground.”

A National Trust spokeswoman said: “The removal of quick vote was proposed as a resolution and voted on at the 2023 AGM. Members voted to reject the resolution and keep quick vote for future ballots. Under the National Trust’s parliamentary scheme, resolutions can only be put to members if they haven’t been proposed at any of the three previous annual general meetings. This is to allow reasonable opportunity for other National Trust members to propose resolutions on other matters that are important to them.