National Trust pays £375,000 repairs bill for Osborne’s country pile
WHEN the National Trust’s loyal army of members hand over t hei r £60 annual fee or volunteer to rattle a fundraising tin, little do they know they are helping pay for George Osborne’s country retreat.
However, the charity, which is led by Dame Helen Ghosh, a former senior civil servant in the Conservative-led Coalition, has agreed t o hand over £ 375,000 to the trustees of Dorneywood, the Chancellor’s grace-and-favour home.
The news coincides with David Cameron’s appointment of his great friend Lord Chadlington as trustee of the Queen Anne-style mansion, set in rolling Buckinghamshire countryside.
Chadlington is a lobbyist and neighbour of the Prime Minister who sold him a piece of land next to his Oxfordshire estate for £140,000 in 2011.
The National Trust says it has agreed to pay an annual grant of £75,000 for five years to ‘fund a backlog of repairs’ at Dorneywood, used by baronet’s son Osborne for entertaining.
The house was left to the nation by Lord Courtauld-Thomson in 1947 with an endowment fund that provided an income of £455,646 last year.
At the same time he left the 200-acre estate to the National Trust, which owns the freehold. Latest accounts for t he Dorneywood Trust s how that £46,929 was spent on repairs, renewals and refurbishment in 2014, £21,993 on heating and lighting, and £2,869 on catering. Seven staff were employed, costing £ 202,304. The £75,000 grant remains largely unspent.
Osborne’s enthusiastic use of Dorneywood has cheered staff at the house, where ministers had been reluctant to stay since John Prescott grudgingly relinquished it in 2006 after a series of embarrassments.
In a photograph that came to be a defining image of the New Labour years, the Deputy Prime Minister was pictured playing croquet on its lawn when he was meant to be running the country in Tony Blair’s absence.
PRESCOTT had also earlier entertained his lover, the secretary Tracey Temple, at the house. Dorneywood’s trustees said in 2013 that ‘a strategy is being developed to seek charitable donations toward a programme of refurbishment’.
Surely that ‘strategy’ wasn’t just calling in a favour from Dame Helen?
A National Trust spokesman says: ‘ We negotiated a l ease with the Dorneywood Trust after identifying significant maintenance costs.
‘As part of that, we agreed to provide a voluntary grant towards the upkeep of £75,000 a year.’