Can Rory Stewart rescue the ‘woke’ National Trust?
Rebels say ex-mp as chairman could help charity get back to its roots
RORY STEWART, the former Conservative Cabinet minister, is understood to have applied to become chairman of the National Trust, which has been forced to defend itself against claims that it aspires to a “woke agenda”.
Mr Stewart is seen by rebel members as someone who could return the 126-year-old charity to its roots: looking after historic buildings, interiors, artefacts, gardens and the countryside to the highest standard.
Mr Stewart, the former secretary of state for international development who challenged Boris Johnson for the Tory leadership in 2019, is understood to be seeking to replace Tim Parker, who resigned in May.
The role – the most senior among the charity’s 50,000 volunteers – is unpaid.
The deadline for applications was last Sunday and Odgers Berndtson, a recruitment consultant retained by the National Trust, is due to start assessing candidates at preliminary interviews from Oct 25. The successful candidate
will be announced by the end of the year.
Rupert Gavin, the chairman of Historic Royal Palaces, who was tipped as an early contender for the job, did not apply.
No candidates wanted to comment when approached by The Daily Telegraph and the National Trust declined to say who had applied.
External applicants are expected to face a stiff challenge from Orna Ni-chionna, who has been the trust’s deputy chairman since 2014 and is understood to be keen to replace Mr Parker. He served two three-year terms, and agreed to a “third exceptional term” to provide stability during the Covid-19 crisis.
Ms Ni-chionna will have a chance to impress the interview panel on Oct 30 when she presides over the trust’s annual general meeting at the Harrogate Convention Centre in Harrogate, Yorks.
That meeting could test Ms Ni-chionna’s resolve as Restore Trust, a rebel group set up this year, is backing a slate of members that it says “best represents our values” to be appointed to the trust.
A new company – RT 2021 – has been set up to handle the £50,000 that has been donated to its campaign.
Neil Bennett, a spokesman for Restore Trust, said appointing Ms Ni-chionna would be unacceptable because “someone who has already served on the board for eight years would not seem to me to be a suitable candidate for an organisation that needs change”.
There was anger last September when the trust published a report linking its properties – including the home of Winston Churchill – to Britain’s colonial past.
Mr Bennett explained: “Restore Trust is a movement of National Trust members who feel the National Trust – specifically the senior leadership of the National Trust – has lost its way.”
TThe organisation has the chance to restore the faith members once had in it, but it must abandon ideology and faddish exhibits
Interpretations, gimmicks and ‘experiences’ seem to have taken over from faithful care of the original houses, gardens, landscapes and farms
he National Trust will hold its annual general meeting two weeks from today, in Harrogate. It will be its first real (as opposed to virtual) AGM since Covid. The intervening period has been the most troubled in the trust’s history, so the meeting ought to be an occasion for frank self-examination at the top.
The current signs are that it will not be. The trust management has decided to bristle angrily against critics rather than trying to improve goodwill. This week, a National Trust spokesman told The Guardian that it was under attack by “paid-for campaigns that back candidates with ideologies opposed to our values”.
This was a pointlessly aggressive way to refer to the new grass-roots organisation, Restore Trust. Restore Trust is explicitly committed to restoring the values that founded the National Trust – the conservation, for the public, of “places of historic interest or natural beauty” – hence its name. To this end, it is endorsing some candidates for the trust’s council and advancing some resolutions for the AGM. (Voting by members not attending the AGM closes on October 22: all you need to vote online is your membership number.) Restore Trust would not exist at all if there were not widespread disillusionment with the way the trust is being run.
The plague from Wuhan created genuine, enormous problems for the National Trust: what do you do if the public are not allowed to visit the houses and gardens you hold in trust for them? But instead of simply getting on with a programme of necessary retrenchment, it allowed ideology to run riot. First, an internal report was leaked attacking the “outdated mansion experience” (what you or I would call the careful conservation of beautiful country houses). Next, the “interim” report of trust properties’ links with slavery and “colonialism” was published, creating controversy by its poor scholarship and judgmental character. Winston Churchill was one of its prominent victims. It also emerged that a “colonial countryside project” was in progress. This took parties of young schoolchildren round trust properties to tell them how wicked the former owners (often donors, too) had been, inviting them to write poems denouncing them.
As public anxiety spread, many related discontents surfaced. The redundancy programme, partly inevitable because of Covid, seemed to many members of staff to be targeted against older, more knowledgeable employees who did not conform to “diversity” criteria. Curators, the traditional mainstay of conservation scholarship about trust properties, were cut. The organisation denies this, pointing out that curator numbers have increased. The Restore Trust response is that this is largely a sleight of hand, since employees previously called “visitor experience consultants” have been rebranded as “experiences and partnerships curators”, with no increase in expertise.
As for the far more numerous National Trust volunteers – the unpaid labour whom the visiting public meet much more often than the staff – these have been fiercely reduced and, some of them claim, rudely treated by management. One of the Restore Trust-backed resolutions at the AGM complains that volunteers have not been properly consulted before changes take place. The National Trust’s legalistic defence is that consultation would create obligations to them under employment law. Surely, if there were a will, the trust could find a way through that one.
The unease echoes in the membership, which has fallen markedly (despite renewal discounts) since Covid. The phrase “National Trust” has in the past been taken to mean what it says. Members have trusted the organisation. Less so now. Interpretations, gimmicks and “experiences” seem to have taken over from faithful care of the original houses, gardens, landscapes and farms. Respect for the spirit of place, so essential for such a diverse heritage, seems to have been replaced by that of a cross between a didactic museum and a kiddies’ theme park.
Stourhead in Wiltshire, for example, is a world-famous example of 18thcentury classical style and craftsmanship, in furniture as well as architecture. Yet if you enter its hall today, the first thing that confronts you, blocking the vista to the next room, is a large white cube. One of its faces asks, “Why do objects matter?” Another lists possible objects which the trust thinks might matter to the visitor, such as “the apron he cooks in” and “that magnet you bought in Barcelona”. On top of the cube lie several objects, including a globe, a teapot and a quill pen. Even if I had ever bought a magnet in Barcelona, or worn a cook’s apron, how would this intrusive display enhance my understanding of Stourhead?
Something similar happens in gardens, often crowded with instructions saying, “Catch your breath” (Glendurgan, Cornwall), “How has Nature helped you connect?” (also Stourhead) or “Slow your pace and enjoy the place” (generic).
The interventions can be magnificently unhistorical. At Croome Court, Worcestershire, a mansion with a Capability Brown garden, some trust showman heard recently that in 1760, the then owner, Lord Coventry, had demolished the cottages of his tenants next to his new house, and evicted them. A pretend 18th-century protest was organised for the edification of visitors: National Trust employees marched with placards saying, “Down with Lord Coventry!” Coming across this parade by chance, the Coventry family archivist felt compelled to point out that Lord C had actually knocked down his tenants’ houses to build them better ones. The trust pageant revealed the prejudices – and the ignorance – of those involved.
Amidst assorted troubles, the trust chairman, Tim Parker, resigned this summer, embroiled in the scandal of the unjust imprisonment of subpostmasters at the behest of the Post Office, of which he is also chairman. So now there is a vacancy. Applications closed this week.
The appointment process for a new National Trust chairman makes the election of the Pope look transparent. Britain’s largest membership organisation gives no say whatever to the members, welcoming their money but not their opinions. Its nominations committee selects, in secret, one candidate and its council then approves whoever that may be. There is little chance, therefore, that the existing establishment will cede power to any challenger. Rumour suggests Sandy Nairne, a member of the trust council and former director of the National Portrait Gallery, and the current deputy chairman Orna Nichionna, a businesswoman, as candidates. Both are able people, but both are implicated in what has gone wrong.
A prominent outsider candidate has reportedly come forward at the last minute. Rory Stewart, the writer, traveller, and former Cabinet minister, is a dark horse and a lone wolf – if one can be two animals at once – so I cannot place him in any faction. But his commitment to our country’s built heritage and land stewardship (the trust owns 600,000 acres) is real. I have direct experience of his conservation skills because I visited him in Afghanistan. There, against every possible disadvantage of war, filth and poverty, he had cleared the rubbish which had buried the old city of Kabul, restoring eight acres of old buildings, streets and courtyards and filling them, via his Turquoise Mountain charity, with revived Afghan crafts and workshops. It was about the only Western initiative in that country which succeeded. Rory seemed to love conservation and to know how it can enhance modern life.
I fear it is the lack of love for the trust’s historic collections, buildings and gardens that is most disheartening about the current leadership. The members feel that love, though, and will respond warmly to leaders who share it. Restoration and reconciliation can be accomplished, but only with urgent change.