The National Trust keeps its critics at bay for now, but will the populist threat return this year?

The Sycamore Gap tree on National Trust land, cut down in an apparent act of vandalism in September
Alexandra/Adobestock
For many National Trust members, 2023 will be remembered as the year the ancient Sycamore Gap tree on National Trust land in Northumberland, loved across the UK, was cut down in an act of vandalism. But 2023 will also be remembered as a triumph for the progressives in the organisation.
The trust’s current management saw off the challenge from Restore Trust, a pressure group amply supported by right-leaning media outlets like the Telegraph and populist figures like the former politician Nigel Farage and the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. In the words of Zewditu Gebreyohanes, Restore Trust’s former director, the trust has betrayed its members by moving away from its primary “remit” as a conservation charity towards what she describes as “divisive ideologies”.
At the National Trust’s annual general meeting (AGM) in November, the trust’s members rejected all five of the nominees that Restore Trust had put forward for the council, along with both of the group’s resolutions. In the aftermath, Gebreyohanes announced she was stepping down from
her position and the group appeared to suspend its activism push. But, according to an internal email seen by The Art Newspaper, the group has already begun a renewed fundraising round among its followers in an attempt to regain momentum in 2024.
What, then, is next for the National Trust? Having seen off such a wave of populist criticism in 2023, can it resist becoming dragged, once again, into a culture war in the new year?
The battle with Restore Trust is far from over, says Celia Richardson, the trust’s director of communications and audience insight. “I think they will be back,” she says. “Many of the people behind it remain the same and I have no doubt they will find new ways to press their case. They have got some people interested and their name has been heard.”
Restore Trust, since being founded in 2021 by Cornelia van der Poll—a lecturer in Ancient Greek at the University of Oxford—has continued to increase its visibility, partly thanks to paid-for social media adverts which feature Farage and Rees-Mogg.
Former Restore Trust director Zewditu Gebreyohanes
Eyevine
Questions have been asked of those behind the scenes. Neil Record, for example, is a Restore Trust founder and board member. But he is also a supporter of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate-sceptic thinktank which operates out of London’s 55 Tufton Street, the home of several right-wing media and policy organisations. The Legatum Group, which part-funds the Legatum Institute—Gebreyohanes’s now primary employer—is a major investor in the conservative broadcaster GB News, which has invited both Gebreyohanes and Van der Poll for lengthy interviews focused on the trust.
The issues Restore Trust has focused on have varied over time, ranging from the National Trust’s approach to addressing links to histories of colonialism and slavery within its buildings to, most recently, issues around centralised governance and voting practices at AGMs.
But Richardson says the National Trust has tried to stop itself from participating in a conflict across airwaves and column inches. “For a long time, we were trying to take this approach—what if there was a culture war and no one came?” she says. “But we were seeing that people were beginning to believe some of the stuff that they had read, and so we have taken a much sterner approach. We have put in many more requests for clarifications and apologies, reprints in newspapers.”
The need for such interventions seems unlikely to go away. Not long after the AGM, a new set of headlines derided the National Trust for trying to—as the Daily Mail phrased it—“abolish Christmas”, a reference to a trust decision to exclude Christian holidays from an “inclusion and wellbeing calendar”. The trust has since clarified: “This internal guidance is specifically designed to supplement the National Trust’s year-round programming that includes Christmas and Easter, which are national public holidays and which are celebrated at all of the trust’s properties.”
Gebreyohanes, meanwhile, speaking to The Art Newspaper after announcing her departure, was steadfast in her claim that the National Trust was not staying true to its “charitable objectives”. She could not confirm if Restore Trust would press ahead with its campaigns, though she did say: “I think it probably will continue.” Restore Trust did not reply to The Art Newspaper’s request for comment. But Richardson thinks the group could be back with an entirely new set of issues in 2024.
Martin Drury, who was the director of the National Trust from 1996 to 2001, and on staff there from 1973, says criticisms of the trust are nothing new. “There have been three or four of these apparent crises in my memory of the National Trust, and eventually they have all faded away,” he says. “The Trust always learns from these bouts of criticism. And I’m sure it is learning now.”
How the organisation will move forward from this current inflection point remains to be seen. Looking ahead, it has a “strategy to 2025” with ecologically minded causes at its heart. In November, shortly before the COP28 meeting in Dubai, it published a report that “outlines for the first time the charity’s approach to climate adaptation and details how technology is helping detect future threats to its places”. These priorities may themselves draw criticism, but Richardson emphasises the responsibility the charity has to advocate for the environment. “I think everybody can agree that the greatest threat facing the places in our care is climate change,” she says.
Major projects due to begin in earnest in 2024, meanwhile, include the repair and restoration of the Grade I-listed Wightwick Manor in the West Midlands, the sorting and cleaning of the paper archive at the Victorian Lanhydrock estate in Cornwall and the restoration of Isaac Newton’s house in Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire.
For now at least, the organisation can focus on such core work knowing that it has kept its critics at bay. But what does the past year say about the current climate in which the trust is forced to operate, and the challenges that may lie ahead?
“Institutions are being used as proxies,” Richardson says. “It is that simple. The National History Museum, for example, had the recent National Conservatism Conference occupy the hall. These spaces are being occupied by groups—and it is not just spaces, it is reputations and brands.”
The National Trust weathered a storm in 2023. But, as the new year breaks, it is still, it seems, facing a determined and well-resourced opponent, one determined to somehow exert its will.

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