In most scandals, there’s a moment when facts known all along resurface to assume new significance. Peter Mandelson’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was public for years, but fatal amidst the flood of emails released in the US. After the truth about Jimmy Savile came out, his creepy behaviour on his TV shows suddenly made sense. But for the man we used to know as Prince Andrew, the new facts are about finances rather than sexual.
In 2007, Andrew and Sarah Ferguson received £15m for their sprawling “ranch-style” mansion near Windsor, known as Southyork, after Southfork in the 1980s TV soap Dallas. The buyer was a Kazakh oligarch, Timur Kulibayev, son-in-law of the country’s president. He paid £3m over the asking price, which was already millions above an independent valuation. Was this the lustre added to the property by the York name? Or was the oligarch paying to get close to the Royal Family? Andrew was unabashed, saying: “I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
This was part of a pattern. The emails released in the US reveal that he tipped off Epstein about “high value commercial opportunities” – to mine gold, uranium, and marble – in Helmand, Afghanistan, when the British Army was fighting there. The prince, as he then was, knew about these deals only because of the privileged access he had as Britain’s trade envoy. As the former business secretary, Sir Vince Cable, has said, it was “appalling behaviour” to pass on this confidential information. Our soldiers were not dying in Helmand for Jeffrey Epstein to make money.
We do not yet know the full extent of what Epstein did to earn help from the Queen’s second son. Stunning details have emerged of the close and durable relationship between Epstein and the Yorks. Andrew’s biographer Andrew Lownie says Epstein secretly bankrolled Sarah’s life for 15 years, giving her £2m. She wrote to him asking for “£20,000 for rent today” and “50 or 100,000 US dollars to help with… small bills”. She had to grovel to him after trying to cut ties because of his conviction for procuring a minor for prostitution. “I know you feel hellaciously let down by me,” she emailed. “I must humbly apologise to you and your heart for that.”
At least she didn’t have any government secrets to pass on. Andrew allegedly sent Epstein official reports from trade envoy trips to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Vietnam – often minutes after receiving them from his special adviser. The Times reported on Friday that Thames Valley Police are widening their investigation of him to include allegations of corruption. We should remember that Andrew has not been convicted of any crime, and denies any wrongdoing. Still, the trade minister Sir Chris Bryant described him in the House of Commons as “a man on a constant self-aggrandising and self-enriching hustle” who “could not distinguish between the public interest, which he said he served, and his own private interest”. He’s not the only one. There is a long history of members of the Royal Family trying to monetise their HRH status.
This may even include the late Queen. Elizabeth II was usually exempt from the scrutiny given to other royals because of a deferential media’s respect for the monarch. She was also very good at her job. Stoic and implacable, she seemed immune to the scandals affecting other members of The Firm. “Don’t do, just be,” she told Prince Charles. Yet there is a revealing anecdote about the Queen, told by the author AN Wilson in the Daily Mail, and it does not reflect well on her.
According to Wilson, an ambassador hosted the Queen and Prince Philip for a three-day official visit. He was shocked to get a bill for thousands of pounds. This turned out to be the cost of the Queen’s dresses and “many” suits and shirts for Prince Philip. The ambassador questioned this, but someone in the Foreign Office told him: “They do this wherever they go.” The Queen – the richest woman in the world – could live on expenses for a large part of the year because she travelled so much. These vast sums never appeared in any account of what the Royal Family cost the British taxpayer.
In Wilson’s 1993 book The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor there is a story about how the death of the Queen’s dressmaker, Norman Hartnell, caused panic among London’s couturiers. This was not because they all wanted the royal commission; on the contrary, they dreaded it. Wilson asked why and was told that the Queen Mother had seldom paid a bill in her life. The Queen, his informant said, paid “on the nail” but seemed to think that prices had not risen “since 1947”. As Wilson writes, if the House of Windsor arouses envy and rancour in the populace at large, it is largely because of their meanness and their greed.
In the 1970s, the republican Labour MP Willie Hamilton investigated the Royal Family largely through questions about their spending. He called them “gold-plated scroungers”. He knew that – as with the story about the Queen’s dresses – it’s always the details that are devastating. But he found it very hard to elicit those details, saying: “The Government and the Palace have kept up a smokescreen to prevent the public seeing what is really going on, on the whole question of the royal finances.”
That was in 1972, but little has changed. Charles, the man Hamilton called “a nitwit and a gentle parasite”, is on the throne, but we don’t know much more about the royal finances. Security costs for the royals, for instance, are never disclosed, though estimates range from a few million to more than £150m per year. We still don’t know how much in “expenses” the Foreign Office is paying for the many royal trips abroad.
The Civil List – the Royal “pay claim” as it was described by Hamilton – was replaced in 2012 by the Sovereign Grant. The Royal Family receives tens of millions of pounds each year from it based on profits from its various businesses. The Duchy of Lancaster produced more than £27m for King Charles in the last reported year; the Duchy of Cornwall produced almost £24m for Prince William. Both are exempt from corporation tax and capital gains tax.
The Royal Family’s most outrageous financial privilege is their exemption from the 40 per cent inheritance tax paid by every other family in the land. This meant that most of Queen Elizabeth II’s estimated £1.8bn personal fortune passed to King Charles without a penny of tax paid. It has allowed him to keep intact things like George V’s stamp collection, thought to be worth £100m.
The Windsors’ personal finances are so entangled with the nation’s finances – through the Sovereign Grant, the duchies, tax exemptions, opaque security costs, and charges to embassies – that we have no idea how much we pay to sustain their lives of extraordinary luxury. When it comes to their finances, the royals say, like Louis XIV: “L’état, c’est moi.” We need another Willie Hamilton. We need a public inquiry to audit the Royal Family.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest showed that the law applies to everyone. Everyone should pay the same taxes, too – royals as well as commoners.
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