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Finally, some part of our struggling state is getting a massive budget increase – and it’s not even the welfare bill, like normal. Or maybe it is? The monarchy’s core funding is going to double to £100m. Also mentioned under cover of the same info dump is the fact that the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace is currently coming in at £369m, but the King and Queen don’t want to live there when it’s done.
Personally, I’m a big fan of the gaiety the Windsors add to this nation, willingly or otherwise, but I do worry: are we enabling a culture of dependence that isn’t actually great for any of the people involved? Does the royal economy need rebalancing, if it is simply impossible to own an absolutely vast private network of land and high-end properties without somehow still needing a top-up from the state? You’ve heard of the poverty trap – will no one think of the royalty trap?
Maybe the Windsors would argue their sovereign grant counts as “in-work benefits”, given their royal duties. But looking at some numbers circulated by the MP Norman Baker this week, one has to wonder if we are actually discouraging work with an overly generous safety net. According to Baker’s research, Prince William has done 57 royal engagements so far this year, which doesn’t feel like the shift we might expect from an able-bodied – if mental-health-obsessed – 44-year-old man, while the King, who is 77 and has cancer, has done 76. Princess Anne is beating the pack yet again with 100. She’d be fine, but by rights William would have quite a sticky call with his Jobcentre Plus work coach, and would be more likely to pick up a sanction than a doubling of benefits.
I appreciate that in the summer months in particular, there is a flood of migrant royals to this country and they very ostentatiously just do nothing. It must be galling for William to have to get up on a couple of mornings a week and trudge towards a ribbon to cut, while some arsehole foreign prince is just lying in bed till noon before revving a Bugatti round Mayfair then mooching back to the hotel to carry out a couple of sexual assaults. I get it. The perception of unfairness matters, and many royals feel it keenly. I remember reading the tech author Evgeny Morozov describing a scene his literary agent had allegedly witnessed in Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion, where the then Prince Andrew and his sex case friend were getting foot massages from a couple of Russian girls. Andrew was complaining how other royals had it so much better than him. “In Monaco,” he reportedly said, “Albert works 12 hours a day, but at 9pm, when he goes out, he does whatever he wants, and nobody cares. But, if I do it, I’m in big trouble.”
I know what you’re thinking – wait: when did this waste of space ever do a 12-hour week, let alone a 12-hour day? But set your eyerolls aside. The politics of envy benefits no one. Andrew was big on how vital it is to encourage enterprise. In this case, an international sex trafficking enterprise (unknowingly, according to his denial) – but I think we’re supposed to get the point.
As I say, William talks a lot about mental health, so it’s possible he’s one of the 1.3 million and rising working-age adults with limited or no capacity to work for mental health reasons. Yet work brings so many benefits, from dignity to purpose to being able to buy your own stuff, and I worry that William could be ushering in a turbocharged era of intergenerational dependence, where the royals become people who don’t really work because they didn’t see their parents doing it. Then again, it’s perfectly possible that William does work more than that engagement tally indicates, only for himself, rather than the nation. Some say he has deprioritised public engagements in favour of boosting his private finances. After all, he is not – how to put this? – economically inactive, because the other revelation this week is that he paid £7.76m in tax last year, after an entirely opaque number of deductions. The King paid £12.9m, which, reports inform us, places him in the top 100 UK taxpayers.
(Sidebar: that glimpse of the surprisingly little it takes, in the context of the super-rich, to be in the top 100 taxpayers tells its own story. Every time I read a stat like that I wish to offer a personal note of thanks to every chancellor, Labour and Conservative, who ballooned Britain’s tax code to a ludicrous 23,000-plus pages – the longest in the world – and made it a charter for avoidance at the highest levels. All of this was a choice, made by successive chancellors, and whether they understood the choice they were making – you’d hope they did, given their job – the outcome is the same. Many more big-hitters get around it.)
Anyway, back to the main event. The royal family are treated as a sort of zero-sum game, a brand asset so valuable to the nation that almost any crazy price hike ought to be approved because of soft power and tourism and whatnot. And yet, I can’t help feeling you could very much have the soft power and the tourism and the whatnot with a somewhat less outrageous funding model. Not to be vulgar, but how does Charles’s “slimmed down” monarchy now seem to cost twice what the bloated one did?
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Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to Be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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