National Motor Museum confusion proves we need plain speaking

I didn’t realise the National Motor Museum and the Beaulieu Estate were anything other than the same thing, and that was fine. In fact, I imagine that was part of the idea when the estate-owning Montagu family established a museum trust in 1972 to be responsible for the car collection housed there.

This week we’ve learned they’re not one and the same. Beaulieu doesn’t own the National Motor Museum – at least not everything in it. Does that matter? To us it doesn’t, but clearly it does to them. They each got their own thoughts, those aren’t the same and hence now it matters to us too.