What has groping got to do with Britain’s most magnificent stately homes?

Not much, you might think. Except if you’re a big cheese at the National Trust, the organisation obsessed with turning our heritage into an excuse for achingly PC campaigns.

After a chaotic 12 months in which it attracted widespread criticism for its gay rights season, while reducing the great Christian festival of Easter to little more than a commercial egg hunt, it seems the Trust has learned nothing.

This month, it unveiled its Women And Power campaign to mark 100 years since women got the vote.

In the magazine’s article on an exhibition at Winston Churchill’s house, Chartwell in Kent, Britain’s wartime leader is criticised for opposing women’s suffrage

In the National Trust Magazine’s spring issue, Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project — a website documenting sexism worldwide — kicks off the campaign with an article that begins: ‘In early 2012, a man followed me home, aggressively propositioning me and refusing to take no for an answer.

‘Later that week, another man groped me on a bus and, a few days later, two men in the street made graphic comments about my body . . .’

Harangued

Horrible incidents — and I feel very sorry for Ms Bates. But is this what Trust members really want to read?

Or to be harangued by Ms Bates’s views on gender equality, including the fact that ‘54,000 women lose their jobs every year as a result of maternity discrimination, and an average of two women are killed by a current or former partner every week . . .’

It’s hardly relevant to those seeking a stroll in elegant grounds or a slice of carrot cake against a Palladian backdrop.

The article continues: ‘Appointed Home Secretary in 1910, Churchill was tasked with ending the suffragettes’ militancy, ordering arrests after the “Black Friday” demonstration in Parliament Square’

It gets worse: when the dust sheets are lifted in some of the Trust’s country houses over the coming months, visitors will be confronted with an agenda that has little to do with their interest in our heritage.

In the magazine’s article on an exhibition at Winston Churchill’s house, Chartwell in Kent, Britain’s wartime leader is criticised for opposing women’s suffrage: ‘Appointed Home Secretary in 1910, Churchill was tasked with ending the suffragettes’ militancy, ordering arrests after the “Black Friday” demonstration in Parliament Square.’

Praising Churchill’s wife Clementine for being supportive of votes for women, the author can’t resist sniping that ‘few couples with opposing views on suffrage were as high-profile as the Churchills’.

Next in the firing line is Lord Curzon, Tory Foreign Secretary and nearly Prime Minister. This important 20th-century figure is singled out for his shameful gender politics.

‘There were few who opposed suffrage . . . more staunchly than Lord Curzon, co-president of the National League For Opposing Woman Suffrage from 1912-1918. He maintained women lacked the “balance of mind” to use the vote.’

Next in the firing line is Lord Curzon (left with Sir Robert Vansittart), Tory Foreign Secretary and nearly Prime Minister

As a tiny postscript to this hatchet job, it is acknowledged that Curzon gave two of its finest properties — Bodiam Castle in East Sussex and Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire — to the Trust.

The Trust has no qualms about belittling benefactors.

Last year, in its Prejudice And Pride pro-gay rights campaign, it outed as homosexual Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, a distinguished writer who bequeathed his home, Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk, to the Trust.

The late Ketton-Cremer was an intensely private man, and the ‘outing’ deeply upset friends and relatives.

Volunteers at Felbrigg were forced to wear rainbow- coloured lanyards to celebrate 50 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality. After 50 refused to do so, they were told they would be banned from interacting with visitors.

When the National Trust Magazine isn’t banging the drum for gender equality, it’s declaring class war.

An article on George Bernard Shaw’s house, Shaw’s Corner in Hertfordshire, crowed: ‘The Shaws were committed socialists and part of the Fabian Society, whose members believed that capitalism produced an unequal society . . . They fully supported the [suffrage] cause and also felt strongly about social equality more broadly across gender, race and class.’

I’m all for the women’s vote, gay rights and a more equal society, but as a Trust member for some 30 years, I’m also for our greatest conservation body doing just that — conserving houses and landscapes, rather than pushing an overtly political agenda.

In the National Trust Act of 1937, the Trust’s duties are declared to be the preservation of buildings of national interest and beautiful landscapes.

Five million people haven’t become members of the Trust because they want to be told about sex crimes or be bombarded with PC messages.

What they want is a peaceful and historically inspirational break from life’s grim realities. But the Trust’s senior management has long since given up caring what members think.

This week, it emerged that chairman Tim Parker has dismissed claims that the Trust had become a bit too politically correct for its own good as ‘goofy’.

Hijacked

In an internal email, he said the Trust’s actions had been ‘misconstrued’ as part of a ‘silly season’ in rows over sexuality and faith.

And he defended director general Dame Helen Ghosh, who was criticised for allowing Easter to be hijacked by a confectioner when Trust properties were plastered with purple posters urging people to ‘Join the Cadbury Egg Hunt’ — deleting the name of the religious festival.

Tim Parker (left) defended director general Dame Helen Ghosh (right), who was criticised for allowing Easter to be hijacked by a confectioner when Trust properties were plastered with purple posters urging people to ‘Join the Cadbury Egg Hunt’ — deleting the name of the religious festival

I can assure Mr Parker the Trust’s actions haven’t been misconstrued, and the only silly season is the one that has blighted the Trust since 2001 — largely thanks to Dame Helen, and her predecessor Fiona Reynolds.

Together, they presided over a Trust so ‘Left-leaning’, it prompted Sir Roy Strong, former director of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, to describe it as ‘the Blair government in exile’.

As political campaigns took priority, so the Trust’s mission — of conserving our heritage — was given a back seat.

Last year, in preparation for a public lecture entitled Betrayal Of Trust: How The National Trust Is Losing Its Way, I visited dozens of its properties and was astonished by the dumbing down of an institution I once adored.

Alienate

It was clear that the Trust’s scholarly role in explaining its fabulous properties — one of our greatest contributions to world culture — and their contents had been devalued.

Dame Helen even ordered the removal of antique furniture from the Regency library at Ickworth House in Suffolk, temporarily replacing it with bean bags. There was ‘so much stuff’ in Trust houses, it put visitors, other than the middle-class, off visiting, she decreed.

Under Dame Helen’s leadership, which thankfully ends this year, another trendy issue has been given prominence — global warming, because ‘extreme weather is the single largest threat to our conservation work’, apparently.

Last October, at the Trust’s AGM, I heard senior management bemoan the white, elderly middle-classes who make up a huge proportion of the Trust’s volunteers and visitors.

Most organisations would be thrilled with five million members of any age, class or skin colour.

Only the National Trust is crazy — and rude — enough to attack the background and interests of its members, and to alienate them with relentless campaigns that have little to do with its raison d’être — preserving this nation’s beauty and heritage.