The National Trust took the knee

In a recent interview, Hilary McGrady, the director-general of the National Trust, complains that ‘The culture wars we’re trying to grapple with are never something I supported’. I do believe her: she is not a political warrior. But what she does not acknowledge – or possibly does not understand – is that it was the wokeists within the National Trust’s staff, and the outsiders they commissioned to help them, who started the fight. There would have been no unhappiness among members if, to improve historical understanding of Trust properties, more attention had been given to the origins – good, bad or something in between – of the money which built them. We could all benefit from being better informed, for example, about how Henry VIII and friends helped themselves to the former monasteries which the Trust owns. But what was clear about the NT’s ‘interim’ report about slavery and ‘colonialism’ (a tendentious word, never explained), and the Colonial Countryside Project, which incited schoolchildren to write poems attacking former owners of Trust properties, was that these were unscholarly political projects. Some of the Trust’s senior staff also tried to take advantage of the Black Lives Matter hustle of 2020. The bosses were too scared to resist. The National Trust took, with creaking joints, the knee.

Deluged by the complaints that followed, the Trust did make some adjustments. The chairman went. Some preposterous staff tweets stopped. Some ignorant, polemical notices in Trust properties came down. Structurally, however, the Trust learnt the wrong lessons, increasing its bureaucratic power by instituting the Quick Vote system for council elections and resolutions. Its impatience with its own country houses continues. It broke its promise to rebuild Clandon Park, which burnt down on its watch, probably because it feared accusations of glorifying slavery: the Onslow family, who built Clandon, profited from West Indian plantations.