If the National Trust can be captured by a fake grassroots group, what public institution is safe? | Stewart Lee

Restore Trust's insidious campaign to get its preferred candidates on to the body's board could set a dangerous precedentAh! The turning of the seasons! Once it was always early summer, as swifts swooped from gables, when the private limited company Restore Trust would announce the "anti-woke" candidates it hoped to parachute on to the National Trust board. As the elephant hawk-moths emerged in the simmer dim, Restore Trust would unveil would-be guardians of our heritage such as the evangelical Christian Stephen Green, who has supported the death penalty for some homosexuals in Uganda, and the pliable biographer Andrew Gimpson, who is even worse, having described Boris Johnson as "a statesman of astonishing political gifts? impelled by a deep love of his country and a determination to serve it to the uttermost of his powers". I wouldn't trust Gimpson with a single Jammie Dodger, let alone our national scones. Either way, Restore Trust's declaration of war on the woke National Trust has become an annual event as comforting, in its own way, as the once reliable blooming of the daffodils. But suddenly, like that yellow splash of colour, it seems to happen earlier every year.Nostalgia is an illness. But it always seemed important to my mother that the daffodils were out by my birthday in the first week of April. Perhaps, because my earliest birthdays were skewed by the uncertainties of orphanages and foster homes, it mattered to her that something as permanent as the daffodils, and by association the apparently endless cycle of seasons, should mark the anniversary of my arrival on your Earth. I still think of all daffodils as mine, and resent Wales's cultural appropriation of my flower. Especially when it already has the leek, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and Pot Noodle's "too gorgeous" Peter Baynham.Stewart Lee appears with Celya AB, Fern Brady, Rob Brydon, Rob Delaney, Kevin Eldon, Rosie Holt, Athena Kugblenu and Nish Kumar in Belter for the Shelter, in aid of Hackney Night Shelter, at the Hackney Empire, London, on 1 FebruaryDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...