It is shown that a weakly closed subspace ${\cal S}$ of a nest algebra ${\cal A}$ is closed under conjugation by invertible elements in ${\cal A}$ , that is, $a^{-1}{\cal S}\,a={\cal S}$ if and only if ${\cal S}$ is a Lie ideal. A similar result holds for not-necessarily-closed subspaces of algebras of infinite multiplicity. An explicit characterisation of weakly closed Lie ideals in a nest algebra is given.