The National Trust has been gifted the building which houses Rules restaurant, London’s oldest restaurant which specialises in game on its menu – click here.
As you can see, I’ve visited Rules with a friend, as you can read in Inglorious (pp 239-40) I visited with other friends (and have done since, too), and as you can see through the following links I had a bizarre interchange of correspondence with the restaurant about lead shot.
23 March 2015, What are the Rules? – click here
23 March 2015, Rules replies – click here
8 April 2015, This was not a fake review – click here
I heard Celia Richardson, the National Trust Director of Communications and Fund-raising (it’s always a bad idea to have these two functions under a single director – there is a conflict of interest between telling the truth and telling the expedient stories that bring in the money) on PM talking about Rules. She is very good and I trust the NT pay her a large salary. She can make it sound as though she is answering a question when she is negotiating her way around it and getting back to talking about what she (and NT) want to get across. It’s a knack! Ms Richardson strikes me as being very talented.
Getting a building worth £11m sounds quite a gift but the NT can’t realise that £11m ‘cos of that ‘inalienable’ thing. They can get rent from it for ages (if it is a profitable enterprise – hard to tell without looking at the books rather than the menu) but they presumably have responsibilities too. One has to wonder why the former owner let go of the place – presumably not because he had run out of ways to spend the money it brings in?