The BBC can’t resist speculating on the science

In this column (26 September), I pointed out that the National Trust’s new ‘Gazetteer’ of its 93 properties linked with slavery and ‘colonialism’ was not so much a scholarly documentation as ‘a charge sheet and a hit list’. Once the organisation entrusted with the care of a building denigrates that building’s most famous occupants, logic suggests it will care for the building less well than for that of an occupant it admires. This logic is already starting to work through. The National Trust owns Thomas Carlyle’s house in Chelsea, but now it has closed it ‘until further notice’, whereas all the other small houses of the Trust in London will reopen in March. For the first time since it was opened to the public in 1895, the place will have no live-in housekeeper. Although not stated, the reason for this downgrading would seem to be Carlyle’s racial views. When it does reopen, members are promised ‘a different visitor experience’.