A response to Stewart Lee writing in the Observer from Dr Mark Stocker

As a politically slightly left of centre Restore Trust supporter (no oxymoron!), I felt impelled to respond to the Observer’s invitation to write a letter-length response to Stewart Lee’s article on the National Trust’s supposed capture by the likes of us. For whatever reason, the Observer didn’t see fit to publish my piece, and nor has Mr Lee (yet) responded to my friendly email reproducing it.  I’m not holding my breath!

Sir,

Stewart Lee’s tirade on the National Trust’s capture by ‘a fake grassroots group’ (28 January) demands a response. 

Yes, one or two of Restore Trust's major backers are significantly different from me (and him) in their politics, but here I believe they are largely justified. Not only did Lee clearly make no attempt to contact Restore Trust, but remarkably, he overlooks all the following: 

• the Trust’s effective abandonment of Clandon House after its tragic fire, unlike the superbly rebuilt Uppark, which provided employment opportunities for craftspeople.

• the repeated snubs given to long-standing, often conservative, yet till recently remarkably loyal unpaid volunteers 

• the Trust’s ongoing failure to contact historians with specialist knowledge and track records, especially in the sensitive and contested area of imperial history

• the fear sent through the ranks of curators who put art and architecture before politics of being restructured out of their jobs, which was only allayed by a public outcry

• the ‘quick vote’ system, making it deliberately complicated for ordinary Trust members to vote for representatives not vetted by the leadership and toeing an obedient party line.

If Lee visits Restore Trust’s website, he would find that among its board members are long-time members of the Labour and LibDem parties, together with apolitical heritage professionals including the highly respected art historian Alastair Laing.

I will never be witty as Lee, but will conclude by saying ‘Long live the Tudors and Stuarts! Down with the Stewarts!’

(Dr) Mark Stocker

The opinion piece which appeared in the Observer on 28 January 2024

If the National Trust can be captured by a fake grassroots group, what public institution is safe?

Stewart Lee

Restore Trust’s insidious campaign to get its preferred candidates on to the body’s board could set a dangerous precedent

Ah! The turning of the seasons! Once it was always early summer, as swifts swooped from gables, when the private limited company Restore Trust would announce the “anti-woke” candidates it hoped to parachute on to the National Trust board. As the elephant hawk-moths emerged in the simmer dim, Restore Trust would unveil would-be guardians of our heritage such as the evangelical Christian Stephen Green, who has supported the death penalty for some homosexuals in Uganda, and the pliable biographer Andrew Gimpson, who is even worse, having described Boris Johnson as “a statesman of astonishing political gifts… impelled by a deep love of his country and a determination to serve it to the uttermost of his powers”. I wouldn’t trust Gimpson with a single Jammie Dodger, let alone our national scones. Either way, Restore Trust’s declaration of war on the woke National Trust has become an annual event as comforting, in its own way, as the once reliable blooming of the daffodils. But suddenly, like that yellow splash of colour, it seems to happen earlier every year.

Nostalgia is an illness. But it always seemed important to my mother that the daffodils were out by my birthday in the first week of April. Perhaps, because my earliest birthdays were skewed by the uncertainties of orphanages and foster homes, it mattered to her that something as permanent as the daffodils, and by association the apparently endless cycle of seasons, should mark the anniversary of my arrival on your Earth. I still think of all daffodils as mine, and resent Wales’s cultural appropriation of my flower. Especially when it already has the leek, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Pot Noodle’s “too gorgeous” Peter Baynham.

But this year, the daffodils are already emerging. And so is Restore Trust. But its annual cycles should not be affected by climate. The supposed grassroots pressure group is in fact a 55 Tufton Street-affiliated outfit, hiding in plain sight like the Jimmy Savile of scones and aiming to discredit the current National Trust board. Its former director Neil Record is a chief donor to 55 Tufton Street’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, part funded by a charity commemorating an American oil heiress, and which opposes many net zero environmental policies. It’s a small world. But I wouldn’t want to cool it.

Restore Trust places easily discredited news stories in the Daily Telegraph and the Times, and uses opaquely funded social media campaigns to try to strong-arm its preferred candidates on to the National Trust board. Mysteriously, company records show its funding has almost doubled in the accounts it filed this month. But the National Trust’s arcane constitution enables it to operate as a lone Asterix village-style holdout in a public sector that has seen the Tories place whichever go-to golems they like on to boards. At the BBC, it’s Robbie Gibb, shameless Maitlis-wrangler and former adviser to GB News.

And the Victoria and Albert Museum has benefited from the expertise of the former Restore Trust director Zewditu Gebreyohanes. She has also worked for the ExxonMobil-funded thinktank the Policy Exchange, one of the Tufton Street gang of organisations, and is now a senior researcher at the pro-Brexit Legatum Institute thinktank. Another arm of Legatum funds GB News, alongside the dad of the thick twat who banjoed for Mumford & Sons. I’m aware this gibberish sounds as if it’s designed to make anyone who’s noticed what’s happening look insane. Hold on to What You Believe!

But why does Restore Trust want to take over the National Trust? Apparently, it objects to tiny plaques explaining in very small writing that slave trade money may underpin some of our aristocracy’s enormous wealth. But cloaks of ideological concern often conceal naked avarice. Did the disgraced Brexit-backing hedge fund manager Crispin “the Crisp” Odey, who made an estimated £220m shorting the pound because of the negative financial impact of the Vote Leave victory, regularly ponder abstract notions of sovereignty? Maybe Restore Trust’s tentacular chthonic backers want to drive up the value of the scone stocks that capturing the National Trust would see them monopolise.

On Thursday 18 January, with unprecedented earliness, a calculatedly misleading Restore Trust advert appeared on social media announcing, innocuously: “If you love unspoilt historic houses, gardens and countryside you should be a member of the National Trust and use your vote to keep it unspoilt. Sign up at Restore Trust.” Was it a pre-emptive attempt to sabotage the National Trust elections? Or an example of data harvesting, like the Tories’ helpful online “tax calculator” that then gives them all your details, in an apparent breach of privacy rules? Only Restore Trust’s undisclosed backers know for sure.

The dishonest announcement was gone within days, and in turn an uncharacteristically clarified Keir Starmer called out the fabricated culture war on the National Trust, Britain’s most trusted public institution. On Tuesday, the dead-eyed Tory eugenics-fanboy Ben Bradley, who recommended vasectomies for workless families with several children in order to avoid a “vast sea of unemployed wasters”, described Starmer’s concerns as “vacuous nonsense”, before it was pointed out that he himself had previously described the National Trust as being “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the woke agenda”. The stupid worm’s cock.

National Trust staff have trees to pollard, paintings to restore and scones to bake. It doesn’t serve our nation’s interests for them to be relentlessly bullied by well-funded fake grassroots groups trying to force their place-people into positions of power. But the fact that the National Trust has, so far, been able to resist dark forces that in the end, I regret, will inevitably overwhelm it, has shone a light on how vulnerable other British institutions are to capture. It’s 11pm on Wednesday night now and the early daffodils are glowing outside my Cheltenham hotel window. They are earlier every year now. Like Tufton Street’s first fetid forays.