The National Trust’s AGM has become an annual battle between the charity’s leadership and their conservative critics. The event always seems to follow the same pattern – legitimate concerns are raised, but the charity’s entrenched leadership always wins. And last weekend’s gathering in Swindon was no different.
The National Trust is a great British institution we should be proud of. Since its formation in 1895 it has been instrumental in keeping England’s land green and pleasant and predominantly since the late 1930s has saved countless historic homes from ruin. With its Project Neptune, since the 1960s it has acquired and preserved 10 per cent or nearly 900 miles of the English, Welsh and Northern Irish coastline. (Scotland has a separate National Trust). And the National Trust is not replicated at scale in any other nation. It now owns over 500 stately homes, manors, castles and other historic buildings. It is the largest private landowner in the UK. Its holdings extend to over 600,000 acres.
What is especially great about the National Trust is that it is a freestanding charity independent of the state, albeit one granted special powers by various Acts of Parliament.
But over recent decades it has succumbed to Sullivan’s law of politics – named after journalist and aide to Margaret Thatcher, John O’Sullivan. His aphorism asserts that “all organisations that are not actually Right-wing will over time become Left-wing.”
The most recent issue of the National Trust magazine – undoubtedly the highest circulation British print title as it is sent free to its over 5.3 million members – makes virtually no mention of the houses it looks after, concentrating on its nature conservation role. Some of the Trust’s critics like to argue that this is a betrayal of its purpose, which is not really fair as protecting natural beauty was its historic purpose. But nevertheless, it does illustrate that those running the National Trust appear to suffer from almost a sense of embarrassment about owning so many stately homes. Preserving these products of extreme wealth is not exactly in keeping with the bien pensant zeitgeist.
And the National Trust appears to have done its best to make a public display of this embarrassment. It has gone out of its way to highlight any links any of its houses have with slavery, however peripheral. And in a desperate quest for relevance, its social archeologists have done their utmost to find any queer link to its properties, however obscure.
What tactics should those who abhor these developments employ? The National Trust has a complex governance structure. It has a 36 member council, half elected by the membership for three year terms (so six or so places up each year – it was five this time around) and half appointed by 18 other heritage and conservation groups. The council in turn appoints the governing Trustees and theoretically holds them to account.
In 2021 Cornelia van der Poll, a lecturer in Ancient Greek at the University of Oxford, set up Restore Trust – a group aiming to wrest the National Trust back from its current wokery and return it to its previous path of righteousness. The tactics it has adopted for doing so is to put forward resolutions and a slate of its own candidates for the Council. In 2025 that slate included historian and former Supreme Court justice Jonathan Sumption – so candidates of outstanding calibre.
Why have none of them won? Restore Trust puts the blame on the National Trust’s voting system, specifically something called Quick Vote. Until recently members could give their proxy vote to the chair of the AGM to cast at their own discretion. Unsurprisingly the chair always backed the current leadership and went along with the status quo.
Since 2022, instead of members having to plough through resolutions and read the statement of each individual council candidate (there were 35 this year), they could tick one box and go along with all the official recommendations. In this year’s vote, 52 per cent of members who voted did so via Quick Vote. Without these timesaving submissions, the official slate would still have won – but the result would have been close.
But I think there is a deeper problem – turnout. In this year’s election, only around 63,000 members voted, including those using the lazy Quick Vote. That is a turnout of around 1.5 per cent of its 5.3 million members, surely amongst the lowest found in any election. What Restore Trust must find a way of doing is galvanising more of the silent majority to exercise their democratic rights as members. This is made more difficult by the fact that the National Trust does not allow council candidates to campaign, beyond making their official statements. That must be challenged, but if it is, recapturing the charity is within Restore Trust’s grasp.
