Barrington opts for the traditional forelock tug and withdraws NTS confidence motion

Anyone who listened to today’s interviews with National Trust for Scotland’s (NTS) current CEO, Kate Mavor, on Radio 4′s Scotland Live and The Word at One, would have heard the defiant voice of the remnants of a demonstrably out-of-touch management team. Nothing is wrong at the Trust – with its management style, with its decisions and with its finances.

So that’s why the NTS was facing a challenging AGM tomorrow, with two confidence of motions demonstrating lack of confidence in the present Chair and Council. Note the words ‘was facing’ and read on.

Mavor’s saccharine assurances that the team is privileged to look after ‘Scotland’s treasures’ failed to acknowledge that she herself had led a disastrous attempt to shut down eleven of these treasures – one in Argyll, Arduaine Garden.

This was the action that brought about the foundation of lobby group, In Trust for Scotland (ITFS), which has doggedly persisted in insisting that all is not well with the Trust; that there is a ‘poisonous’ divisiveness affecting morale in the organisation’s staff; and that the basis for the Trust’s published finances may be more opaque than it seems.

In challenging the clumsy autocracy of the management culture created by Chair, Shonaig MacPherson, who is to stand down, ITFS has shone a light on a sick organisation, one riddled with unchallenged values of a previous age, deference to a ruling class.

Ironically, this attitude, imbuing the tapestry of the Trust, has now aborted an attempt by a member to formalise the profound unrest within the organisation. Charles Barrington had put down two motions of confidence to be voted on at tomorrow’s (26th September) AGM at Murrayfield. Having attracted long running attention and respect for his stand, he has allowed himself, at a late stage, to be persuaded to withdraw the motions.

This allowed Mavor to boast on the airwaves that resistance had collapsed, suggesting that it was born of an aberration reversed by the birth of greater wisdom. Barrington’s weakness bought that. It must be galling for the doughty ITFS, soldiering on alone, rubbished at every turn but responsible for a wide awareness that there in indeed something wrong with the Trust.

In the end the culture of the forelock tug, in Barrington’s ultimate deference to seniors in the Trust, has allowed the persistence in office of a regime dedicated to undermining the very ancien regime values that permeate the Trust.

There is a need for such action but the fascism of the current management has thrown into favourable relief the dignity and gentler values of what it seeks to replace. However retrogressive it may be, brutalism is not the answer.

It’s an interesting spectator sport and, sadly, tomorrow is unlikely to bring much else. A missed opportunity.