National Trust should preserve our history – not cover up the past

What in the name of all Tudor Revivals is going on at the National Trust? Its latest wheeze has been to cover busts and paintings of men with plastic and sheeting at Cragside, an extravagant Northumbrian pile. Why? In order to highlight female marginalisation, of course.

Now that might be great as a GCSE art project. But when someone’s forked out £20 to peruse the Victorian industrialist William Armstrong’s impressive art collection, it’s preposterous.

I’d like to think heads will roll, but I suspect that National Trust director general Hilary Mcgrady, who took up her post earlier this year and is keen on radicalism, might actually approve of this posturing. How else did such a juvenile project get the green light? Or has Cragside gone rogue?

The National Trust was set up in 1895 to preserve the nation’s heritage and open spaces – and of course provide a quid pro quo tax fiddle for indigent aristos everywhere. Last year it had around 26.6 million visitors and generated almost £600 million in income from its five million-strong membership, property and legacies. But in recent years its efforts to “reach out” have been cringeworthy at best and at worst alienating.

I don’t pay my £114 joint annual membership to subsidise “egg hunts” from which the word “Easter” has been redacted. Nor did I have much truck with the LGB cream-tea imbroglio that saw volunteers in Norfolk mutiny after they were compelled to wear Gay Pride lanyards – an order than was mercifully rescinded, but only after news headlines forced a U-turn.

But back to Cragside, which used to be a grand day out before its hijacking by the politically correct agit-prop brigade. Yes, there’s currently a vigorous and long-overdue gender debate going on in key public forums. But since when did dragging recalcitrant teenagers round coffer-ceilinged country houses of a Sunday afternoon constitute a key public forum?

I’m all for examining, analysing and jettisoning misogyny and casual sexism. Print pamphlets. Plaster it on information boards. As women, the future is ours to shape. But hands off our history. When identity politics manifests as a literal cover-up, which is to say a distortion of the past – our past – the argument instantly loses moral legitimacy.

As the mother of two rambunctious, free-thinking daughters, perhaps I should be cheering more loudly for retrospective male repression? But in truth, my 10-year-old’s bookshelves are crammed so full of books with titles like “Fantastically Great Women who Changed the World” and “The Brilliant Women” collection that I worry she will grow up thinking Frida Kahlo invented electricity and Coco Chanel wasn’t a Nazi.

We visited Rome at half term and she learnt all about the prudish popes who covered up heroic nude statues with fig leaves and painted strategic drapery across Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement. She wasn’t impressed. Hiding men – their faces, or any other body part – is just another wrongheaded attempt to exercise control over the collective experience of art that was created to reflect reality as it was, not as later generations wish it to be.

What our 21st century National Trust needs is an injection of common sense, common purpose and common practice across all its 300 historic houses. Its role is that of custodian – not subversive.