A.N.WILSON: Forget King Charles’s family, the Royals’ life of luxury is at OUR expense
Harry and William are not the only pair of royal brothers who seem to be at war with one another. Prince Andrew’s ‘friends’ claim that he is furious with the King for telling him that he can not expect to receive £249,000 per annum from the Duchy of Lancaster.
This was the sum, apparently, that the late Queen used to give each year to Andrew, her supposed favourite child.
The sovereign is the Duke of Lancaster and receives the enormous rents which come from this portfolio on top of their money from the Civil List.
The King is said to have warned his family that they must tighten their belts and not expect to get as much money as their late mother had been paying them.
At a time when inflation is hitting every household in the country, it does look rum that individual members of the Royal Family should be helping themselves to quite such large sums.
Sense of entitlement: Prince Andrew, right, with the late Queen Elizabeth II and Charles
And it looks particularly bad if the money is dished out not to the more popular or hard-working royals, but to a man who is no longer a working royal, who has been told not to use his HRH title, not to wear naval uniform, and to keep a low profile in the aftermath of the Virginia Giuffre scandal.
The King has been correctly advised that if he uses Duchy of Lancaster money to bail out his younger brother, the public will not stand for it. Andrew inhabits Royal Lodge, the enormous grace-and-favour mansion on the Windsor estate. It is where the Queen Mother used to live the life of Riley, with enormous, luxurious house parties for her sybaritic friends.
READ MORE: Charles ‘won’t leave his brother homeless and penniless’ as Andrew faces not being able to maintain upkeep of Royal Lodge when his £249,000 annual grant is slashed in April
But those days were different, and the Queen Mother, a hugely popular figure with the public, was able to get away with it.
It was in 2003 that he signed a 75-year lease on the property for £1million, and under the terms of the lease he was expected to pay for all the expensive renovations.
The house needs a major refurbishment, which will cost a fortune. And so Andrew has been using his ‘friends’ to whinge. He says that if the King cuts his Duchy of Lancaster allowance he will be forced to leave his home, worth some £30million, with its huge number of rooms, its 98 acres, its swimming pool, and its vast household staff.
It simply beggars belief that this man believes he is somehow entitled to live in this way. Although we are all politely saying that he lives at his late mother’s expense or the present King’s expense, we should recognise that it is in a way at OUR expense.
This is because governments since Victoria’s reign have given sovereigns the income from the Duchy as a favour, and this is therefore a highly sensitive issue.
The King himself, for the moment, is enjoying a spell of popularity, but these things fluctuate.
Harry and William are not the only pair of royal brothers who seem to be at war with one another
Many of us are prepared to give Charles the benefit of the doubt, however much, in the past, he might have struck false notes – going on television with Jonathan Dimbleby to confess to committing adultery being only one of them. If his popularity falters, however, Charles’s personal wealth will undoubtedly be held against him by a population who are struggling with mortgages and debts, and whose taxes help pay for his luxurious way of life.
Apart from Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle which are paid for largely by taxpayers, King Charles owns Sandringham, Balmoral and Highgrove as his personal property, and he is an enormously wealthy man.
So, too, is Prince Andrew. He is said to have inherited a lot of money from his mother. But Charles knows – or his advisers know – that it is simply intolerable for him to be given Royal Lodge and lorry-loads of money in order to maintain it. Andrew’s attempts to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the public have revealed how out of touch with public feeling he still is.
He is said to be thinking of suing Mrs Giuffre for the £12million settlement he is said to have paid her. He has suggested that the photograph of him with his arm round her when she a teenager is a fake.
And, in the most extraordinary twist of the plot so far, his friend Ian Maxwell – Ghislaine’s brother – published a photograph of the bathtub in her London house where Mrs Giuffre alleges the pair had sex.
Andrew is said to be thinking of suing Mrs Giuffre for the £12million settlement he is said to have paid her
In this appalling photo, two clothed individuals are sitting in the bath, the man with a Prince Andrew mask and the woman with a Virginia mask. The picture is supposed to demonstrate that the tub was too small to allow for any improper activity.
We thought it was impossible, after Prince Andrew’s Newsnight remarks about his inability to sweat, for him to become any more embarrassing. But the bathtub escapade is even more cringe-making – just as Charles prepares for the Coronation.
The truth is that it is too late for him to make amends with the public. His friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell was a colossal error of judgment.
Yet with each unfolding episode of the scandal, he made it much worse for himself – not least in the disastrous decision to give that Newsnight interview to Emily Maitlis.
Everything was wrong about this decision – he showed not an ounce of consideration for the trauma experienced by the teenagers tangled in Epstein’s web, was stupid enough to think he had come out of the interview well, and was astounded when every single person who saw it was mortified.
The unfortunate fact is that he was a highly unpopular person anyway. As Trade Envoy he made a number of blunders and was forced to step down, having earned the nickname ‘Air-Miles Andy’.
‘The King is right to put as much distance as he can between himself and his brother’
The sensible royals keep as low a public profile as possible. They know that public opinion is fickle. And they also know that we taxpayers are entitled to question how the Royal Family is financed.
Prince Andrew probably wishes we would all mind our own business, but it IS our business that a member of one of the richest families in the world is expecting what many regard as a public subsidy to enjoy a grotesquely luxurious and extravagant life of privilege.
The King is right to put as much distance as he can between himself and his brother.
Ask any sensible person, however much of a monarchist they may call themselves, whether Prince Andrew should be living at Royal Lodge and the answer would be – to quote Mrs Thatcher’s words of long ago – no, no, NO!
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