The National Trust is 130 years old this year and has marked the occasion with a ten-year strategy document. Only, this is not a strategy at all, but a slideshow of a mixed bag of projects framed by platitudes (‘This isn’t the end of the conversation, it’s the start’) and vague ambitions (‘End unequal access to nature, beauty and history’).

When it comes to actual conservation, the page on Clandon Park shows a tragic poverty of ambition and reluctance to rise to a challenge. The National Trust has repeatedly stated, wrongly, that an authentic and lively reconstruction is not in the power of Britain’s most skilled conservation practitioners, and the Trust doesn’t want to know about the opportunity to train the next generation in endangered heritage craft skills such as stucco. The document describes the blackened ruin as ‘powerful and evocative’, like something from the Emperor’s New Clothes, and states pompously, ‘Clandon’s importance is not fixed in time.’ The approach taken in the National Trust’s proposed scheme to leave the house as a charred ruin with modern interventions suggests rather that Clandon’s importance is negotiable to its custodian. Most people understand that normal common sense demands that a fire-damaged grade I-listed building should be restored to the state for which it was listed in the first place, using the funds paid out by the insurer.

The National Trust’s remit is to look after the places in its care. The quixotic aspiration to ‘restore nature, not just on National Trust land, but everywhere’ is unrealistic, to say the least, and risks taking the focus away from the properties in the charity’s care. On the Sherborne Estate fields are overgrown with weeds while farm buildings and cottages stand derelict as they wait to be transformed into a tourist attraction, contrary to the wishes of the donor, who gave the estate so that it would remain a farming community. The National Trust is strangely unwilling to take its obligations seriously.

In increasing access to nature and historic sites, the National Trust proposes to ‘remove emotional barriers like belonging’, making itself look presumptuous and out of touch. The truth is that many members and volunteers have left in recent years because they feel alienated by the National Trust’s political activist stance. If they don’t feel that they belong, that apparently does not merit space in a strategy document.