Starmer is wrong to defend the National Trust

Keir Starmer is drawing up his battle-lines for the next election. First, he came for the public schools, pledging to whack VAT on school fees. Now he’s going for the traditionalist wing of National Trust members. 

In a speech today, he accuses the Tories of ‘waging a war’ on charities and civic society. He claims the Conservatives have denigrated the National Trust by accusing it of pursuing a ‘woke’ agenda: ‘In its desperation to cling onto power, at all costs, the Tory party is trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect.’

So that’s how Starmer is dividing the electorate for the general election. He wants to attract the middle ground by attacking the supposedly crusty, traditional wing. It makes crude, electoral sense. Still, his attack on the Tories is by proxy an attack on the traditionalist members of the Trust – in particular the members of Restore Trust (I am one, incidentally), who deplore what has happened to their beloved institution.

Starmer claims today that: ‘It comes to something when the Tories are at war with the National Trust.’

In fact, we Restore Trust members are at war with the dumbing-down, infantilising people who’ve been running the Trust for the last 20 years.

The Trust used to be a byword for high-minded thought, with an eye for fine, aesthetic presentation at its exceptional country houses. But, over those last two decades, there has been a catastrophic intellectual decline. Captions in displays have appalling spelling and grammatical mistakes. Facts are dispensed in favour of dim, kiddy-friendly opinions. And the Trust has increasingly become a political organisation, wading in on climate change, colonial history, gay rights and feminism.

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It’s completely right that the Trust should address, say, the slavery connections in the houses it owns. That’s exactly what Lord Harewood has done at Harewood House, his Yorkshire home, with an exhibition on the Caribbean slaves that produced the fortune that built the palazzo. But when the Trust steps in, it dumbs down and promptly gets things wrong. Its report into slavery connections of its houses was riddled with errors. 

Again and again in those 20 years, the Trust has marginalised scholarship and beauty in a rampant desire to politicise its aims. And, again and again, as it churns out its dumbed-down agenda, it uglifies its houses. The Trust has turned Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, into what its illiterate website used to call the Childrens Country House, without an apostrophe, before a rare employee with a knowledge of English grammar corrected the howler. 

An elegant example of Restoration classicism, Sudbury Hall has been downgraded into a children’s theme park. The fine ground-floor saloon has become a room where children dress up and dance. Desperately dumb speech bubbles have been stuck onto the portraits. The saloon is a disco room, with a mirror ball hanging from the ceiling, with a moronic neon sign saying, ‘Party like it’s 1699’.

No wonder this catastrophe happened. The redesign was led by 100 ‘local young ambassadors’, aged up to 12. Those children are blameless but why let them near the interior of a rare historic house?

In 2023, children were let loose at Croome Court, an 18th-century, Palladian house in Worcestershire. They were given blue crayons by the Trust – and proceeded to scribble all over the 18th-century sculpture of Sabrina, a Roman nymph, and a memorial to Capability Brown, who’d designed the Croome landscape.

It all got disastrously worse after the 2015 fire that destroyed Clandon Park, Surrey, a 1730 gem by the Italian architect Giacomo Leoni. Instead of properly rebuilding the house, the Trust is madly retaining it as a wreck. ‘Most of the interior of Clandon Park will be thoughtfully conserved in its fire-damaged state, offering people a unique ‘X ray view’ of how country houses were made,’ says the Trust. But why? The Clandon Project director, Kent Rawlinson, summed up the craziness, saying, ‘We came to understand that, given the scale of the loss, we’d essentially be creating replica rooms, rather than restoring surviving fabric.’

What’s wrong in creating replica rooms? Why is that worse than leaving a burnt-out wreck? But that is the attitude of the Trust, as exemplified by Dame Helen Ghosh, the Trust director-general from 2012-18, who said there was too much ‘stuff’ in Trust houses.

There is a real crisis going on at the Trust, which has less to do with wokery, and more to do with a tragic decline in standards. 

You can understand why Keir Starmer, in an election year, is doing everything he can to carve out a winning position. But, meanwhile, what was once one of the greatest conservation charities in the world slips deeper and deeper into the mire. 

Harry Mount is author of How England Made the English (Penguin)