This new report lands like a slap however the half that retains echoing is how simply consolation will get protected whereas everybody else counts pennies.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (Picture: Getty)
One thing deep in our nation’s values of truthful play, laborious graft and decency dictates that when somebody in energy is taking the mickey, it all the time will get our goat. The Nationwide Audit Workplace (NAO) dropped the bombshell this week that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor rented out three cottages on the Royal Lodge property, which he leased from the Crown Property.
The report additionally reveals King Charles personally pays the lease for Andrew’s daughters’ lodging in royal palaces regardless of neither being working royals. Princess Eugenie has a pad in Kensington Palace and Beatrice one in St James’s Palace. Each of these palaces are maintained by public funding, by means of the Sovereign Grant.
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- Quantity Andrew might have produced from renting out Royal Lodge properties
- Full record of Royal Relations dwelling lease free or paying peppercorn lease
St James’s Palace (Picture: Getty)
Norman Baker, the previous Residence Workplace minister, known as it “outrageous to subsidise luxurious lodging” this manner, including that the general public was “being taken for a trip”.
That is the primary report into royal residences in 20 years, and it reveals Andrew, his household and workers used 12 properties, owned by the Crown Property or the Royal Family.
He paid £7.5m for repairs when he took on the Royal Lodge’s 75-year lease in 2003, on the premise he then paid a ‘peppercorn’ lease.
Palace sources have performed down Andrew’s rental earnings, suggesting he supplied the properties to workers or retired workers and the money was solely sufficient to cowl operating prices.
First let’s be clear Andrew has carried out nothing illegal however sub-letting three cottages by Royal Lodge – which he did as much as April 2026 – just isn’t a superb look.
Particularly as he already has shamed himself along with his shut and enduring friendship with the now-dead US paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. This simply provides to his woes.
In life optics could be every thing and it simply does not look nice, particularly as so many Britons need to utterly hand over on their desires of getting their very own place.
However Andrew as a mini-landlord?
You might think about him as Leonard Rossiter’s interfering Mr Rigsby in Seventies British sitcom Rising Damp, popping spherical for his overdue lease and a nosy spherical. “Miss Jones!”
Kensington Palace (Picture: Getty)
It is also shameless that regardless of Beatrice having her personal pile within the Cotswolds and Eugenie having a household house in Portugal, they each have ‘free’ houses in royal palaces with their adjusted rents based mostly on outdated market valuations.
They don’t pay any lease for this central London lodging, as an alternative it’s paid by the “privy purse”, which is King Charles’s private cash, to the Royal Family – a deal agreed first by Queen Elizabeth.
With folks within the capital paying by means of their enamel for lease, the concept two non-working royals – profitable businesswomen in their very own proper – are receiving grime low cost lodging screams the phrase “privileged”.
King Charles should now act and act shortly.
First he should ensure that no royal will get a palace pad at under market worth rents, then he should ‘counsel’ every princess gracefully offers up their palace pieds-à-terre, then guarantee no different royal can lease out Crown Property property ever once more.
I imply, it is not like several of them are quick of some bob!
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