Trump tried to bribe my daughter-in-law

You have to give it to Donald Trump: he never stops trying. In a letter dated 25 September, he wrote to our daughter-in-law, who is an American citizen living in Britain (‘United Kingdom Englan’, it said on the envelope) to tell her he was giving her $1,700 under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act ‘which I proudly signed into law’. It is a pretty impressive bribe, and it pays out, I believe, to every American who earns less than $50,000 a year. In Hannah’s case, however, it might not work for the President at the coming poll.

In the National Trust’s recent interim report, ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic slavery’, nothing caused more controversy than its unfavourable mention of Winston Churchill, whose country house, Chartwell, it owns. The entry said that the British government’s response to the Bengal famine when he was prime minister was ‘heavily criticised’. It failed to mention that he was fighting Hitler at the time. It also said that he wrote to his successor, Clement Attlee, in 1947, to oppose the independence of India. In my Daily Telegraph column on Tuesday, I pointed out that this latter point was highly misleading, since Churchill supported full self-government for India, but sought dominion status — allegiance to the British crown — along the same lines as self-governing Canada and Australia, rather than formal independence. Since writing, I have noticed other National Trust moves. On 22 September, the Trust’s director of communications, Celia Richardson, tweeted a call for support against the critics: ‘This week a short factual reference to Churchill in a colonial history report led to calls for our 125 year old organisation to be boycotted & defunded.’ The next day, she blogged about this and the need for ‘full and accurate histories of the places in our care’.