Drippingly right on, the Dame of dubious decisions
CONTROVERSY is nothing new to bureaucrat Dame Helen Ghosh. Her tenure at the National Trust has been marked by her determination to politicise – as she would have it, with a small ‘p’ – the organisation and its four million members.
The outgoing directorgeneral has stoked rows over wind farms, climate change and even Easter during five choppy years at the helm.
But even some gay rights campaigners think she has gone too far with her Prejudice and Pride crusade, with one last night calling it ‘totemic and silly’.
Dame Helen, 61, was ‘drippingly right-on’ and ‘up to this sort of stuff’ throughout her career as a public servant, the campaigner said privately.
As a Whitehall mandarin, she was known for her silken and precise phrasing which one acquaintance described as ‘school-marmy and patronising’.
Another said that sometimes she emphasised her authority and grasp of a subject by casually mentioning she has a first in history from Oxford ( it was announced last month that she is leaving the trust to become Master of Oxford’s Balliol College from next April, one of the most sought-after sinecures in the Establishment firmament).
Born in Farnborough, Hampshire, in 1956 to a librarian mother and a research scientist father, Dame Helen was educated at a convent school.
She studied at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, followed by a postgraduate degree in 6th century Italian history. At 23 she married Peter Ghosh, later an Oxford history don, and they own a £500,000 terrace house in the city.
She entered the civil service at the Department of the Environment in 1979 as an administration trainee.
Her career blossomed under Tony Blair’s New Labour with stints at the Department of Pensions, the Cabinet Office, the Department for the Environment again and HM Revenue and Customs. She brushed off a string of controversies.
While at Environment from 2005 to 2010, her inability to sort out the shambles of the Rural Payments Agency – which was failing to hand out subsidies to farmers – was described as a ‘masterclass in bad decision-making’ by the Public Accounts Committee.
She was made a dame in 2008, when Gordon Brown was prime minister, and rose to become Permanent Secretary of the Home Office in 2011.
But her tenure was notable for rows about Olympic security, policing, the London riots and an inability to monitor immigration efficiently.
She lasted 20 months until November 2012, when she slipped away amid accusations of incompetence and blameavoidance, and reports of tensions with Theresa May, then the home secretary.
Almost immediately, she was appointed to the National Trust, which has an income of £500million a year.
Her former boss did not hesitate to wade into the row about ‘airbrushing faith’ earlier this year when it emerged the word Easter had been removed from the trust’s annual egg hunts.
Mrs May said: ‘ What the National Trust is doing is frankly just ridiculous. Easter’s very important.’
Last year the trust was accused of using ‘ Mafia tactics’ when it bought Lake District farmland at an inflated price, thwarting locals who had hoped to keep it as a working farm.
She also raised eyebrows by calling the restoration of Clandon Park, a Palladian mansion in Surrey, as ‘an exciting new chapter in the Clandon story’.
The ancient seat of the Earls of Onslow burned down in 2015 in what was seen by some as the greatest disaster in the history of the National Trust, set up to preserve Britain’s heritage.
The same year Dame Helen blamed climate change for damage to historical collections in some trust buildings.
After she set out how it would campaign to slow the pace of global warming, critics said the trust risked damaging its popularity by getting mired in a debate that bitterly divides politicians, economists and the public.
But a defiant Dame Helen said: ‘Like any other charity we cannot be political with a capital P, but that doesn’t stop us from campaigning on issues that strike at the heart of what our charitable purpose asks us to do.’
AND in 2013 she said wind turbines were ‘rather beautiful things’ which looked ‘graceful’ before telling opponents of wind farms to ‘open their minds’.
When she was appointed to the National Trust in 2012, one minister remarked that she was ‘more at home in court shoes than gumboots’.
Critics feared an institution set up to glorify Britain’s great houses and monuments was becoming a body intent on ‘modernising’ the past, while cheapening venues with family-friendly activities.
Gardening and ballet-loving Dame Helen was accused of dumbing down when she announced there were to be fewer exhibits. She worried that rooms often have ‘so much stuff’ it puts off all but the middle-classes and launched a strategy that included plans to ‘simplify’ some exhibits.
She was also ridiculed for putting up patronising signs reading ‘Please do touch the trees – or even hug them!’ and ‘Reserved for fun and games’.