William Blake wrote that we can see heaven in a wild flower and hold infinity in the palms of our hands. He also thought a massive flea with a bald man’s face and no pants on came into his bedroom at night, and I speak as a fan. But, like Blake would, I think we can see the world – and everything that is wrong with it – in a National Trust scone. Bear with me.
Until November last year, the Conservative-appointed Victoria and Albert Museum trustee Zewditu Gebreyohanes, formerly of the Tufton Street-linked thinktank Policy Exchange, was the director of Restore Trust. This is an organisation dedicated to parachuting its own preferred right-leaning candidates, including the evangelical Stephen Green, who has denied the existence of marital rape and once supported Uganda’s death penalty for some homosexuals, on to the seemingly impregnable board of the supposedly “woke” National Trust. What even is woke, anyway? It’s the kind of word Jonathan Gullis MP uses to describe anything he doesn’t like, like a Welsh-language edition of the Highway Code, olives on a pizza, or women in lace-up shoes.
Restore Trust is backed by Neil Record of the Tufton Street climate crisis denial bodies Global Warming Policy Foundation and Net Zero Watch. In November last year, Restore Trust director Gebreyohanes left to join the pro-Brexit free-market cheerleader the Legatum Institute, which shares senior fellows with various Tufton Street thinktanks and is funded by businessman Christopher Chandler’s Dubai-based Legatum Group. Legatum is also the chief backer of the loss-making GB News, along with the former banjo-playing twat from Mumford & Sons’ dad, Sir Paul Marshall, the would-be Telegraph buyer, who has shared Islamophobic material online. There are ponds full of frenziedly spawning toads with more dignity than this financier clusterfuck.
Having failed to discredit the National Trust at Restore Trust, Gebreyohanes made it her first job at the Legatum Institute to publish a report on 21 March called National Distrust, calling for the secretary of state for culture, media and sport and the Charity Commission to intervene in National Trust governance.
A 2019 report penned by Gebreyohanes’s former Tufton Street-linked Policy Exchange shaped Sunak’s criminalisation of climate protesters, so these documents are dangerous in the hands of a failing government desperately looking to create enemies it can appear to defeat. I’m going to write a report blaming the Princess of Wales for all potholes, bedbugs and haemorrhoids and see if it can get any traction in Sarah Vine’s Daily Mail column. But I suppose I’ll have to wait until Kate is well enough to be a legitimate tabloid target again.
Gebreyohanes’s National Trust report was immediately amplified in the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, by the former National Trust chairman Sir William Proby, who repeated a false claim about National Trust procedures – namely, that National Trust trustees in effect select the National Trust council themselves – that the Telegraph, which appears to run whatever messages Restore Trust wants it to, has already had to apologise for when it printed it for the first time in November last year, so that apology obviously worked.
Currently, the Restore Trust website, reeking of desperation, criticises the National Trust not for wokeness, but for its inability to make “decent scones”, in response to a story that conveniently ran last weekend in the Mail. “Critics have condemned the use of a vegetable-based spread instead of butter in the baking as a ‘virtue-signalling betrayal’, in what looks like yet another woke row involving the charity,” reported both Chris Pollard and Daisy Graham-Brown, working as a Woodward and Bernstein-type team. The offending vegan scone was then pictured alongside a pot of decidedly non-vegan clotted cream.
In the same Mail story, Restore Trust’s chair, Cornelia van der Poll, a retired lecturer from the now closed private Oxford college St Benet’s Hall, “slammed the move”, seeing the scone as symptomatic of a wider malaise and saying: “It is unfortunate that the National Trust can’t even get scones right, let alone bigger issues such as properly looking after the properties in its care.” The report also quoted a sickened 64-year-old National Trust member from Bury St Edmonds (sic), who said: “I can’t stand the taste of the new scones,” adding: “They are flatter, drier and have an unappealing texture.” And the Eurosceptic MP Bill Cash, who, Pollard and Brown reported, “often has tea and scones in the House of Commons”, rose from his coffin of moist earth and rats to wonder, utterly nonsensically, if the National Trust will “stop selling Madeira cake because of historical events in Madeira”. But what are the Madeiran historical events Cash worries about? The island appears most notable for its six different species of identifiably different indigenous mice, each separated by high hills, ensuring they do not mix, a situation Cash, in his opposition to freedom of movement, would surely approve of.
But then the bombshell! Within days, the National Trust’s tirelessly diligent and heroic director of communications, Celia Richardson, had wasted her precious time to reveal that National Trust scones have been vegan for “many years”, and indeed in 2018 the Daily Mail itself invited readers to celebrate “truly scrumptious recipes from a new book by the National Trust”, including scones featuring no butter and “115g (4oz) of soft margarine”. Stick your Madeira cake in your Notting Hill bolthole, Bill Cash! Cornelia van der Poll!! You know nothing of scones, so why should we trust your opinions on the maintenance of historic properties? And guess what, National Trust member, 64, of Bury St Edmonds!!! The scones are the same! There’s something wrong with your mouth!!! And Bury St Edmonds isn’t even a real place!!!!
But why does Restore Trust want control of the National Trust so badly? Is it about the properties? The land? Or can it really be that Legatum’s Dubai-based backers just really love scones made with butter? I think we should be told.
Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf opens in London in December before a national tour
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