The National Trust and its director-general, Fiona Reynolds, are getting a lot of stick from some Tories. It's not fair, says Clive Aslet

IMAGINE that you have it in for the visually sensitive men and women who work for the National Trust: what punishment, in the manner of the Mikado's elliptical billiard balls, could be more excruciating or apt than to relocate them to a light-industrial town on the M4 corridor? The joke would be almost too good; no one would believe it. Bring to mind where you would expect the National Trust to have its offices. Perhaps a richly furnished country house, complete with landscaped park and scones for tea. Failing that, a handsome building in one of London's most historic streets, next to a leafy park and only a couple of minutes walk from Buckingham Palace. Come to think of it, that is exactly where the National Trust does have its headquarters for the moment, in Queen Anne's Gate. But only for the moment: by 2004 they will have moved to Swindon. Whatever one may think about the National Trust, few people would immediately associate it with a sense of humour, but you've got to hand it to them; this one would make an undertaker laugh.

Picture the old-building specialist, experienced in dating rococo plasterwork, hurrying to work in one of the glass-atriumed office blocks that grace central Swindon. Or the lady gardener, trug basket on arm and secateurs in hand, myopically negotiating the one-way system. Not to mention the expert in bugs and beetles, cut adrift in an urban environment from which all forms of wildlife have been erased. I won't go on. It is quite possible that I am being unfair to Swindon. It may be that this famous railway town is full of unsuspected charms, and is indeed (in the words of the Swindon Borough Council website) `adding a vibrant present and exciting future to its solid past'. (So if you live in Swindon, please don't write to me about it.) The point I am making is that Swindon is not exactly a natural match with the National Trust. In terms of reflecting what marketing people call the core values of the brand, it is off-beam. The National Trust is about beautiful landscapes, remarkable architecture, traditional values and beauty. It is not, to be frank, about Swindon.

Now, it would be easy to blame the relocation entirely on the Trust's new director-general, Fiona Reynolds. To readers of this magazine, and possibly of my own, she is the equivalent of a gorgeously plumed pheasant flying straight at the guns. The first director-general to be a woman. (`Bang,' goes one barrel.) A New Labour sort of person, whose last job was running - wait for it - the Women's Unit in Downing Street, and who has a house husband to boot. (`Bang,' goes the other barrel.) An outside appointment, who doesn't profess to know much about country houses but has an inclination to make the Trust's offering more inclusive of our culturally diverse society. (`Woof,' goes the Labrador, running off to pick up the carcase.)

Actually, these observations, while having a grain of truth, are somewhat wide of the target. The decision to move out of London was taken during the reign of Ms Reynolds's predecessor, the impeccable Martin Drury, a furniture expert who had worked at the Trust for decades and was the living embodiment of its traditional culture. It had to be Swindon, says Ms Reynolds, because of the three National Trust offices already in the West Country. Besides, this `exciting area of urban regeneration' (her words) is also a new base for English Heritage, and offers good value for money.

It has been bad luck on Ms Reynolds and, indeed, on the Trust as a whole that the move should coincide with a staff reorganisation that predates her appointment in January last year. Inevitably, tears have been shed into teacups, and some of the unhappiness has seeped into the media. Jeremy Paxman signalled a new public mood towards an organisation that until recently was regarded as above reproach by giving her a bruising time on Start the Week. The 44-year-old Ms Reynolds, a geographer who chose a complete set of the Ordnance Survey as the book she would take to her desert island, fronts an organisation which is, for the first time in its 107-year history, under attack. Often it is the very people one would have expected to be its passionate supporters who are the bitterest critics, feeling betrayed by its political correctness, its ban on stag-hunting, and its sheer size.

It is odd. By any stretch of the imagination, the National Trust is one of the most successful institutions in England and Wales. (The Scottish National Trust is a different organism entirely, dominated more by hairy-kneed mountain-lovers than by the country-house-visiting middle classes of southern England.) Largely without public money, it has built up a portfolio of coastline, hills, landed estates and gardens, which make it the biggest landowner after the Crown. The quality of its restoration work leads the world. Inhabitants of other, less happy lands used to envy our health service, our railways and our incorruptible Parliament. In recent years, some if not all of the gloss has rubbed off those institutions; but the National Trust is still the ideal to which every civilised country aspires. Some people find that this history of achievement has bred smugness. Let's face it, the Trust has something to be smug about.

You might have thought, in the present political climate, that the detractors would have come from the Left. Despite the hit film Gosford Park and Channel 4's series on an Edwardian country house, country houses are not obviously part of the zeitgeist in Mr Blair's egalitarian New Britain. It was a clever move by the chairman of the National Trust, Charles Nunneley, to defuse that hand-grenade by appointing Ms Reynolds. The writer of one profile caused a wound by referring to her ,small, classless voice': neither a kind nor an accurate remark, but one that does at least indicate that the Trust can no longer be accused of having snobbery on its agenda. Instead, the attacks are coming from a quarter that the Trust would not have expected a few years ago: the traditionalist, Tory flank. In the West Country, the Trust has not been and, by some, never will be forgiven for its precipitate ban on staghunting over its land in the Quantocks, rushed through on the basis of a scientific report whose findings are hotly disputed. Aware of his neighbours' disgust, Lord Patten, who now lives in the West Country, is leading a campaign to have the Trust broken up. In his view, it has become a monolithic organisation, with insufficient regional diversity, which would benefit from a kind of privatisation, even though the Trust is not a government organisation.

One is sometimes tempted to agree with Lord Patten. There can be a sameiness about visiting National Trust properties, which is partly the result of its sense of identity (corporate culture, if you like) being so strong. The shops and tea-rooms could do more to showcase local products. One of the glories of this country is the number of people making weird, beautiful works of craftsmanship: hay-rakes, handblocked wallpaper, wooden puzzles, coracles, architectural models, steam engines, cunning toys, cane fishing rods.... The list may be endless but you can't buy much of it through the National Trust.

In terms of total visitor pleasure, one of the best National Trust houses is now Waddesdon, largely because of the Rothschild family's involvement. This is one of the difficulties that the Trust now faces: 20 years ago it did not have much competition in terms of the quality of presentation which it offered the public. Now, the standards of some privately owned country houses, such as Chatsworth, Goodwood, Alnwick and Arundel, are outstripping the Trust's. Their individuality and quirkiness can make the Trust seem po-faced. Of course, the Trust has its own families in residence: descendants of the owners who gave their buildings into its care. Alas, they are not, to put it mildly, always seen as an asset.

Yet the critics who claim that the Trust is now too absorbed with workhouses, back-to-backs and the birthplaces of pop stars to bother much about country houses have just had this view spectacularly rebutted. Ms Reynolds may not be an architecture buff, but she has masterminded the purchase of Tyntesfield, the enormous Victorian estate outside Bristol, also eyed (it was said) by Kylie Minogue. Tyntesfield, built from a fortune made out of the bird droppings that Victorian farmers used as fertiliser, is not an obviously pretty house, but it is, as Ms Reynolds explains, of immense importance to the mercantile history of Bristol. The partnership she has proposed with local bodies, extending not just to the house but also to the walled garden, stables, farm, sawmill, cottages and other appurtenances of a landed estate, deserves to succeed.