The National Trust is concealing from its members how controversial it has become

As its AGM approaches, it should be embracing its critics, rather than trying to exclude them

Charles Moore | The Telegraph | 8 September 2023

With more than five million members, the National Trust (NT) is the biggest membership charity in Britain. Its Annual General Meeting will be held in Swindon on November 11. Members can vote in advance to fill the five vacant places on its governing council and for members’ resolutions. The online and postal poll opened last week.

As a member, I have just voted. The AGM’s first webpage says voting “will take only five minutes”. This is not true if you wish to know on what and for whom you are voting. To do so, you need to read the short statements made by the council candidates and the wording and explanations of the members’ resolutions.

You should also read the annual report which must be approved by members. On this last point, however, the Trust has saved us time: the annual report is not ready. We can vote for or against it, but we cannot, as I write, read it.

There is only one way to get through everything in five minutes. It is called “Quick Vote”, and you need press only one button. The trouble is you can Quick Vote only one way – to approve the Trust’s choice of candidates, resolutions, auditors and its annual report – everything the Trust wants, and nothing else. If you disagree with the Trust on anything, you must vote slowly.

This is a disreputable method for a supposedly democratic organisation. If you press Quick Vote, by the way, you will automatically be opposing a resolution which calls for Quick Vote to be abolished. (Its legitimacy may also be challenged in a lawsuit.)

It would be a mistake to take the National Trust’s leadership on, well, trust after several years of controversy. The leadership’s approach to controversy is barely to acknowledge and never to debate it. Heritage has become, unfortunately, a contested area, yet the National Trust tries to conceal this from its members, as if we were children.

I read the campaign statements from the council candidates – 37 of them, I think. Most, including those of the five candidates endorsed by the leadership, are strikingly uniform and quite vague. They tend to use buzz words like “strategic vision”, “diverse”, “inclusive”, “behaviours” and “telling our stories” (the jargon giveaway there is the use of the plural), “net zero” and “sustainability”. “Decolonisation” crops up, as does “belongingness”.

Although the statements are rightly strong on concern for nature, a founding part of the National Trust’s purpose, most could as easily have come from a range of eco-pressure groups. They rarely mention the more specific things in the Trust’s care. Thirty of the statements, by my count, make no mention of the word

“houses” or “gardens”; even more ignore the collections. Very few talk about farming, although the NT has over 600,000 acres of land and 1,300 tenant farmers.

A few statements are different. Jonathan Sumption, for example, says this: “The Trust is the most remarkable non-government conservation organisation in the world. Its record in preserving historic buildings, collections and landscapes is unequalled … Any member who values these achievements should want to contribute their skills … to assuring the future of the priceless heritage which it holds in trust for the nation.” You would think such a statement of the obvious would not need saying; but Lord Sumption is right: it really does.

A young candidate, Violet Manners, says: “I believe the Trust has become distracted by a political agenda that detracts from its mission … the Trust must not view its history through the political lens of today when conserving the past.”

Andrew Gimson will be familiar to many readers as a journalist and for his popular potted histories such as

Gimson’s Kings and Queens. In his candidacy statement, he says: “The National Trust has in recent years strayed from its proper purposes. It has made knowledgeable long-serving staff redundant, indulged in managerial gobbledygook, promoted a self-hating conception of history, and suppressed well-founded criticism from members.”

His last point deserves emphasis. It is unhealthy for our greatest mass membership organisation to repudiate the sincere concerns of many members. Its slavery and colonialism “interim” report on its own houses is a sloppy piece of work, as was its “Colonial Countryside Project” which encouraged schoolchildren to write “poems” attacking former owners of NT properties. Both have led to tendentious signage being introduced. Neither has been repudiated by the Trust.

Gimson, he tells me, recently visited

The Quick Vote is a disreputable method for a supposedly democratic organisation two Trust properties in the same village, Clandon, in Surrey. One, Hatchlands, a place of Robert Adam interiors, wonderful Old Masters and a collection of great composers’ musical instruments assembled by its tenant Alec Cobbe, is a house full of life and joy – the Trust’s work at its best.

Two miles away, however, is Clandon Park, given by the Onslow family to the National Trust in 1956. In 2015, it burnt down. Going back on its original promise to rebuild, as it did so successfully at Uppark after the 1989 fire there, the Trust now wishes this 18th-century house, whose chief glories were its interiors, to remain a ruin.

If you visit it now, which some Trust information says you can and some says you can’t, a big poster about the NT “vision” for Clandon blazons a quotation from a “stone and lime mortar consultant”: “It’s rare to work on a project where the skeleton of a building is so exposed …” Most NT members may feel disconsolate that a great house which came to the Trust as a living thing has now, under its stewardship, become a skeleton. It serves as a metaphor for what is wrong.

In 2021, Restore Trust was launched, a forum for the many Trust members concerned about the NT’s direction. For this AGM, it has drafted two resolutions, the one against Quick Vote and the other about the state of Clandon Park. It has also identified five candidates whom it endorses. These are Philip Gibbs, Andrew Gimson, Violet Manners, Philip Merricks and Jonathan Sumption.

All five have relevant experience and strong commitment. If the National Trust accepted the good faith of its members, it would seek to embrace such candidates. They are not entryists, but people who believe in the Trust’s purposes, so they got my vote.

Each year, the Trust’s nominations committee interviews candidates for the Council whom it thinks it might like to endorse. No doubt trying to discourage those it does not like, it sends them emails saying it will not call them for interview. All the five I have mentioned received this brushoff. It was mistaken in all cases. In at least two, it was disgraceful.

The first is Lord Sumption. He was until recently a judge of the Supreme Court and is widely seen as our most intellectually distinguished judge living. He is also the monumental historian of the Hundred Years War and has personally restored a major 18th-century house in London and a great chateau in France. What wise charity, especially a conservation one, would not want his help?

The second is Philip Merricks. A life NT member for 30 years, he is the only farmer in the UK accredited by Natural England to manage National Nature Reserves and was chairman of the Council of the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group. His own National Nature Reserves at Elmley and Swale extend to 4,000 acres. He always promotes the marriage of farming and nature conservation, which should be the way ahead for the Trust.

So much of our nation’s history, culture and natural beauty is in the hands of the National Trust. Don’t wrench it out of shape: restore it.

This article was first published in the Telegraph.