The Spectator’s Notes | 26 April 2018

Hilary McGrady, the new director-general of the National Trust, sent me (and no doubt other journalists) a nice email hoping we can meet. I wish her well, and whenever I find myself criticising the Trust, I am conscious of the fact that, compared with its equivalents abroad, it is a miracle. But I was a bit irritated by her first interview, with the BBC: ‘I want to reach out to more people… The days of walking into one of our beautiful houses and saying a family lived here, that’s not going to do it.’ Obviously, any organisation offering public benefit wishes it to reach as many people as is sensibly possible, but there is something about her framing of the point that is wrong. It implies that the thing for which the Trust is best known is its problem. It is a modern institutional disease. The people who run great organisations get scared by them.