Just like the Anglo-Saxons disastrously paying off the Viking marauders with Danegeld, so the National Trust has attempted to do the same with its desperate virtue-signalling. For the last decade, the Trust has fallen on its knees in deference to every fashionable cause. But, again like the Anglo-Saxons with the Vikings, they can never do enough to appease the insatiable demands of the zealots.
The latest eco-craze is for climate activists to hold protests at over 40 National Trust sites this week to stop the charity banking with Barclays because of its links to the fossil fuel industry. The usual suspects – from Extinction Rebellion, Fossil Free London and Christian Climate Action – will once again spoil people’s hard-earned summer holidays across the coming days with ‘creative’ acts of protest, ranging from picnics to parades and musical performances.
In its lily-livered way, the Trust refused to stand up to these latest climate protesters
Sir Simon Jenkins, the former chairman of the Trust – and one of the last senior figures there who really knew about old buildings – said:
These things are so ridiculous and they’re all about posturing and virtue signalling … The National Trust is deeply involved in all forms of conservation and it’s been leading the way in trying to protect the landscape.
As far as I am concerned, it’s been leading the way in which it heats its properties and its energy use and all these things. Its secondary and tertiary links to various activities that other people don’t like is neither here nor there to me.
Quite right, Sir Simon. The eco-zealots’ demands to be appeased are insatiable – and ludicrous. What next? Should the National Trust stop using fossil fuels to power its vast landholdings? Should the Trust’s millions of visitors be stopped from going to Trust sites because they use evil, petrol-driven cars to get there?
The eco-loons were already at it again this week at Gatwick Airport, chaining themselves to the floor at departures. How impressive the tourists were, carefully stepping around them, to board their flights to their longed-for holidays. What were the green obsessives expecting? That people should refuse to get on their flights and cancel their holidays just because a few protesters with nothing else to do on a working day wanted to stop them?
But, then again, you can see why the green brigade are so emboldened: because so many organisations do crumble in the face of their ludicrous demands. Literary festivals recently gave up their crucial sponsorship money from a bank because the bank had – like practically all banks – a proportion of their funds invested in fossil fuel companies; as do most of us with a pension fund.
In its lily-livered way, the Trust refused to stand up to these latest climate protesters, declaring, ‘The National Trust fully understands the urgency needed to find solutions to the climate crisis and the strength of feeling about this among some of our supporters.’
That’s entirely in keeping with the Trust’s catastrophic weakness over the last ten years. It has gone in for virtue-signalling – on everything from gay rights to slavery to feminism – while its properties literally burn to the ground.
There’s nothing wrong in investigating the Trust’s properties’ links to slavery. That’s exactly what Lord Harewood has done at Harewood House, Leeds, a house largely built on the profits of slavery. But while private properties, like Harewood, carry out clever, dignified exhibitions on all sorts of subjects, the Trust brings its disastrous, dumbed-down touch to its shows: full of spelling and grammar mistakes, with everything brought down to children’s level – indeed, some of its projects are child-led.
There’s nothing wrong in having children’s guides to houses alongside scholarly, grown-up guides. But the children’s approach has often taken the place of the grown-up one – most notably at Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire. Once one of the finest Restoration houses in the country, Sudbury is now the Trust’s so-called Children’s Country House – for a long time called ‘the Childrens Country House’ on the Trust website by the illiterate people in charge of these things. A disco room has been installed at Sudbury with a glitter ball; dim speech bubbles have been plastered over family portraits. Oh, the idiocy of it all!
Worse, at Croome Court, Worcestershire, elegant 18th-century sculptures were covered in blue pencil scrawls by children who’d been let loose at the property last year. And, most scandalously of all, Clandon Park, Surrey, one of England’s best Palladian houses, was burnt to the ground in 2015. And now the Trust refuses to rebuild it properly, lazily preferring to leave it as a ruin.
The Trust has deserted its founding mission – to preserve and protect great houses and landscapes –in order to worship fashionable political causes. No wonder they bow down in the face of the green zealots intent on ruining some of the few nice days we’ve had this summer.
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