Long live the National Trust

If the second son of an ageing Marquess decided to dress in a pink bikini, rename himself Madame Frou Frou and hung the family Canaletto sideways in his crumbling Lincolnshire pile while lighting his farts we’d all chortle at the charm of the eccentric English toff. You can get away with almost anything if your lineage is sound. When Deborah Devonshire moved into Chatsworth in the 1950s, she sliced a portrait of General Monck by Peter Lely in half to fit in a lift bringing food up from her new kitchen. Hint at anything as half as crass as this if you run the National Trust and all hell will be unleashed. Things, the critics say, were always better at some undisclosed point before the vulgarians arrived.

This summer’s storm is over a proposal to change the way the Trust manages its houses. Here, Harry Mount has written a nice bit of polemic against the trendies he believes are dumbing everything down.