“When there is a select committee on the Queen,” Walter Bagehot wrote in 1867, “the charm of royalty will be gone. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Yet as the Guardian’s reporting shows, the monarchy rests not on mantras and vapours, but on a solid financial foundation that has been deliberately shielded from parliamentary accountability. David Cameron was more servant of the crown than of the people when he drew a veil around the monarchy so zealously. In 2011, the then prime minister wanted to end what he described in his memoirs as a “painful annual discussion … about whether individual members of the family were ‘good value for money’”. At a time when Mr Cameron, an ardent monarchist, was inflicting painful cuts to public services, he made it a priority to accommodate the then Queen’s long-held wish to protect herself from scrutiny.
The result was that the prime minister, the chancellor and the keeper of the privy purse now decide every year on the amount of money – in the form of a sovereign grant – the monarch receives from the government, free from troublesome MPs, civil society and newspapers who might suggest taking into account private royal resources, such as those derived from their landholdings. That was the recommendation of the public accounts committee in 2005, which recognised that these were not inconsiderable sums. The Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall together produce profits for the King and the Prince of Wales of more than £40m a year. Yet today the sovereign grant is set at a percentage of surplus revenue from the crown estate – a £16bn publicly owned property portfolio. A “golden ratchet” clause in the deal ensures that while funding for the monarchy could increase in line with crown estate profits, it was guaranteed never to fall. The grant has remained at £86m since 2021.
A constitutional monarchy can only exist with popular consent. These arrangements discourage prying eyes. When MPs on the public accounts committee were critical of royal spending in their first report on the grant in 2014, the then Tory chancellor, George Osborne, dismissed the report as “unfair” and ignored the recommendations. Since then, neither the committee nor the National Audit Office have inquired into whether the public are being served by Treasury largesse, or by royal tax immunity, or by making the monarch’s private realm inaccessible.
For a decade, it has been extremely difficult for backbench MPs to keep a proper constitutional check on the royal accumulation of financial privileges and private wealth. When the late Queen apparently helped her son Andrew settle a claim of sexual assault, it should have rung alarm bells. No doubt King Charles III hopes that his coronation will have an enormous impact on the prestige of the monarchy – and secure his legitimacy. But it is the state that will foot the bill for its antique flummery. That alone ought to make the case for parliament to examine at least the regulation, financing and accountability of the monarchy, as well as the size of the royal household.
Money paid to the royals has been transferred to their own private wealth. It is astonishing that, since 1800, a vast family fortune has been created from public funds. But it is also a product of reflexive royalism, which encourages unthinking attitudes and dysfunctional practices. That must change.
