Harry Mount

Can the National Trust dumb down any further? Its latest crazed venture, the Colonial Countryside project, is 'a child-led history and writing project', working with 100 primary school pupils, 16 historians and ten commissioned writers. The aim is to ensure that 'robustly researched stories of empire are communicated'. So here comes another highly politicised scheme – in the light of its disastrous LGBTQ campaign, forcing volunteers to wear rainbow badges, and outing the owner of one of its great houses, Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, who bequeathed Felbrigg Hall to the Trust.

When will the National Trust get it into its thick skull that it’s supposed to look after buildings and landscapes? It is not a political organisation. But now, yet again, the Trust has weighed in with its political blunderbuss, attacking its own properties for their connections with colonialism and slavery. It has published a document listing 93 properties and places, about a third of the total, with links to colonialism and slavery. Among them are Churchill’s house, Chartwell, thanks to his opposition to self-governance in India. Also there is Lundy island, Devon, once home to prisoners doing unpaid labour and Hare Hill, Cheshire, once owned by a slave-owner. 29 places in all are listed after their owners received compensation for slaves after abolition.

And so the tragic dumbing-down of the once-great National Trust continues, at breakneck speed. In its latest dimbo announcement, it has declared its intention to 'dial down' its role as a big cultural institution and move away from being the custodians of the English country house. An internal briefing document says the Trust intends to put its collections in storage and hold fewer exhibitions at its properties to prioritise its role as the 'gateway to the outdoors'. The ten-year strategy attacks the 'outdated mansion experience...serving a loyal but dwindling audience'. The Trust will instead promote 'specialised experiences' and stop holding specialist exhibitions for 'niche audiences'. In fact, the Trust has been following a similar strategy for at least the last five years.

A study has shown that protestors who took part in Extinction Rebellion’s demonstrations last year were overwhelmingly middle-class, highly educated and southern. Well, there’s a surprise. It turns out some 85 per cent of the London protestors had a degree, a third had a postgraduate qualification and two thirds described themselves as middle-class. Three quarters of those charged with offences lived in the south. And, if the accents I heard from the protestors as I biked through the throng on my way to work were anything to go on, a high percentage were public school--educated, too. I’d never seen so many Econians — the public school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world.

Forget the cigar, the homburg and the V-for-victory sign. If Winston Churchill were around today, he’d be pounding the streets in T-shirt, shorts and chunky trainers. Jogging is an almost compulsory obsession for any Tory alpha male. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt are forever out running; Michael Gove has lost a drastic amount of weight racing around west London; and Boris has revealed he’s down to 15 and a half stone, from 16 and a half. He’s also declared he’d freeze obesity taxes on fattening food — the answer to losing weight was more exercise, he said — and admitted to failing to keep up a vegan diet (he likes cheese too much). But he is certainly looking slimmer since he started going out with Carrie Symonds, 24 years his junior.

 Montego Bay, Jamaica When the Kennedy clan were children, JFK and his siblings would tear off their clothes before leaping from the pier at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts — safe in the knowledge their servants would pick up their discarded clothes. That used to strike me as the ultimate in entitlement before I ended up here in a hotel in Jamaica. I’m being waited on hand and foot in a way that wouldn’t have disgraced the Kennedys — or a 19th--century duke. Someone’s just rung to ask when would be a good time to fill my fridge with beer. A driver is waiting to take me on a tour of Montego Bay. When a friend, also staying here, forgot her diary, her butler brought it from her room to our breakfast table.