The first step towards restoring the National Trust
It is poetically fitting that the resignation of the chairman of the National Trust, Tim Parker, was announced on the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. The collective mistakes that have so damaged the Trust’s reputation were bound up in the rush of many institutions to ‘take the knee’, metaphorically and literally. Immensely delicate questions about how best to study the connections of Trust properties with slavery and (ill-chosen word) ‘colonialism’ were rushed and politicised. The view inevitably spread that the Trust now bears an animus towards the past whose glorious buildings and landscapes it is supposed to protect so that millions may enjoy them. That animus is