The royals are on the make: Our experts analyse latest bombshell

The royals are on the make: Our experts analyse latest bombshell,

The bad news just won’t stop coming. Thanks to the National Audit Office (NAO), we now know not only did Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor live virtually rent-free at his palatial, government-owned home, but was also allowed to sub-let three properties tied to the mansion and pocket the payments himself.

What he did with the money, we simply don’t know.

To add insult to injury, yesterday’s report reveals the former prince – now forced out of Royal Lodge in disgrace – could be entitled to as much as £500,000 compensation for vacating the property early.

Andrew is not the only member of the Royal Family who enjoys a cosy deal, of course: the NAO points out that his daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, have never spent a penny in rent, despite living in royal palaces for nearly two decades.

It is just a few weeks since it emerged that Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, has his own ‘peppercorn’ arrangement from the (taxpayer-owned) Crown Estate for his 120-room mansion, Bagshot Park – and that he also let out a stable block for £130,000 a year.

So, it is increasingly hard to avoid the impression that the Windsors, already among the richest people on the planet, are on the make – at the expense of the hard-pressed British taxpayer. Even ardent royalists know that something needs to change.

It is thanks in no small part to the shocking behaviour of Mountbatten-Windsor and his association with the late paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein, that the reputation of the monarchy is at a new low.

Support for the Royal Family has fallen to 45 per cent, a drop of three points in just four months, according to a major Savanta opinion poll earlier this year. Almost a third of respondents said they preferred to have an elected head of state.

It is increasingly hard to avoid the impression that the Windsors, already among the richest people on the planet, are on the make – at the expense of the hard-pressed British taxpayer

The shocking behaviour of Mountbatten-Windsor and his association with the late paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein, is no small part of why the monarchy’s reputation is at a new low

Shocked by the stream of disclosures about the Windsors and their activities, the public and our MPs are demanding answers on matters they had previously been content to leave alone. And on no point are the royals more vulnerable than the question of their money.

Why is our monarchy so enormously expensive, for example? Where have the Windsors’ billions come from? How have they avoided so much tax and why are their financial dealings wrapped in such a cloak of secrecy?

Today, the monarchy is the only institution receiving public money and performing a public function to have a virtual exemption from the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.

The royals are the only people in the country to benefit from huge and ever-increasing sums of money from the public purse – they now cost us about half a billion pounds each year – while refusing to reveal the extent of their private wealth. Even the Government is kept in the dark.

The Windsors are the only family allowed to keep their wills secret, a tactic that allows them to hide their riches from scrutiny. These exemptions are no mere relic of the past, moreover. This cloak of secrecy has been pulled tighter than ever in recent years. The rot set in when in 2015 – and after a titanic battle – the FOI Act was used to force the release of political letters sent by Charles, then Prince of Wales, to government ministers.

Rather than apologise for abandoning the neutrality required of his position, Charles’s reaction was to lobby for changes to the FOI rules so that any future such correspondence would remain private. As a result, there is now a blanket ban covering all information relating to government dealings with Charles or William, even if publication is clearly in the national interest.

This is supposedly an age of openness yet, when it comes to the Windsors, we still meet secrecy at every turn.

For example, Parliament used to stage an annual debate about the amount of money to be made available to the royals, even itemising which members of the family would receive what. That gave MPs an opportunity to scrutinise the use of public money and hold the monarchy to account.

Today, however – and much to the satisfaction of the palace – there is no annual debate. In fact, there is almost no debate at all. Matters are decided behind closed doors in a meeting between the Prime Minister, the chancellor and a palace representative.

We then have the royal wills. The palace would like us to believe that these have always been sealed. Not so. The practice only began in 1911 to cover up a royal scandal (when the brother of Queen Mary, consort of George V, was discovered to have bequeathed family heirlooms to his mistress).

We are told the sealing of royal wills is to maintain the dignity of the monarchy. But dignity should be maintained by the royals behaving themselves in the first place.

Despite initially resisting calls to declare how much tax he pays on the multi-million-pound income he receives from the Duchy of Cornwall – the £1billion estate he inherited when his father became King in 2022 – William has finally revealed that he handed £7 million to the taxman last year. But a top rate tax of 45 per cent suggests he should have paid more than £10million on the Duchy profit of around £24million. Does that mean he has found more than £3million in deductible expenses, perhaps relating to his seven homes?

Andrew’s daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, have never spent a penny in rent, despite living in royal palaces for nearly two decades (pictured with their mother, Sarah Ferguson)

There is a blanket ban covering all information relating to government dealings with Charles or William, even if publication is clearly in the national interest

These are dangerous issues for the Crown. A recent opinion poll by The Mail on Sunday found that most people, 54 per cent, want Prince William to be more transparent about where his income comes from and how it is spent. Only 23 per cent prefer the status quo.

Perhaps he has finally got the message. Last month it emerged that the Prince of Wales is to sell off a fifth of the Duchy of Cornwall and will invest £500 million of the profits to help tackle the crises in nature and housing.

It is a striking gesture for a man not previously known for great generosity or, for that matter, transparency.

According to the prince, ‘there is so much good we can do. I’m trying to make sure I’m prioritising stuff that’s going to make people’s lives… better.’ All very heartening. Yet it is surely worth pointing out that Wills’s plans mean investing in more housing, resulting in more tenants, more industrial developments – and yet more income for the Duchy – and for him.

So, the rewards for the Windsors, already munificent, continue to accrue. In 2011, the last year of the old Civil List, the taxpayer gave the royals around £31million in total, including £7.9million from the old Civil List.

Yet under its generous replacement, the Sovereign Grant, the amount we’ve handed to the Windsors this year is an eye-watering £132.1million.

With the drumbeat of awkward questions growing ever more insistent, the York scandal is wrecking the reputation of the Royal Family – perhaps fatally. With support for them among the young collapsing and indifference hardening elsewhere, the Windsors risk condemning themselves and the British monarchy to history.

Yet the turmoil also provides an opportunity for regeneration, a chance to bring in reforms which are long overdue and make the monarchy fit for purpose for the 21st century. Today, in conjunction with the Daily Mail, we are launching a campaign for greater royal transparency, not least when it comes to money.

We believe that, together, Buckingham Palace and the Government must enact a series of measures which would help regain the trust and respect of the British people. First, there must be proper parliamentary accountability, with members of both Houses of Parliament being allowed to ask questions about the monarchy and scrutinise public expenditure on the royals.

We believe the bloated Sovereign Grant should be replaced with a new Royal Duties Grant voted upon annually by MPs. This would return us to the position that existed between 1760 and 2011.

The Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster should be subsumed into the Crown Estate, which – despite the name – has been wholly owned by the British public for more than two centuries. (In return, the taxpayer agrees to fund some of the monarchy’s costs.)

Run on ruthlessly commercial lines, the Duchy of Lancaster produced more than £27million for King Charles in the last reported year; the Duchy of Cornwall earned almost £24million for Prince William. The Duchies should no longer be exempt from capital gains and corporation taxes, as they are at present.

Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee should commence a full and detailed investigation into all aspects of royal finances, not least the rents paid for Crown properties such as Royal Lodge, formerly occupied by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. After an initial multi-million-pound investment, he had lived there virtually rent-free.

We believe that much, much more should be disclosed about the activities of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, write Norman Baker and Andrew Lownie

A full list of ‘grace and favour’ properties presently controlled by the Royal Family should be made available. Commercial rents should be applied and the money paid to the Crown Estate.

We believe that royal wills should be open to public inspection. We would like to see a royal register – just like the parliamentary register – in which business interests are declared. This is hardly a new suggestion, by the way: it was first proposed in Parliament more than 20 years ago.

The Royal Family’s freedom from complying with the FOI Act should be removed, leaving only the exemptions that apply to the rest of the population. Thousands of files relating to the Royal Family – some going back to the Victorian period and most completely innocuous – remain closed for no good reason.

All those going back beyond 20 years should now be made accessible, subject to the usual exemptions that apply to public records.

We also want the Royal Archives to publish an inventory of the material it holds – a small step, you might think. The same applies to the Royal Collection Trust, to be renamed the National Collections Trust, which should publish a full inventory of the treasures it holds in two lists: one clearly showing what it keeps on behalf of the Crown and one detailing what is held privately for the King.

Buckingham Palace and its extensive gardens should be fully opened as a public museum. All proceeds from entry tickets to this and other royal properties should go to the Treasury.

Finally, we believe that much, much more should be disclosed about the activities of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. How was he allowed to spend a decade as trade envoy running up huge costs at public expense? Such a scandal must never happen again.

All the files relating to him from the Foreign Office and Department for Business and Trade should be released immediately to help us understand who he met on these trips, who accompanied him, and why.

We need a parliamentary inquiry into Andrew’s time as trade envoy, including evidence from former foreign secretaries, from the heads of the former UK Trade & Industry department which employed him, and from ambassadors to the countries that he visited, including Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. They should be summoned to give evidence on oath.

For those tempted to ignore or dismiss the gravity of the situation facing the Crown, we say think again. Today, the moral compact with the British people has been broken. The good news is that it can be restored, but not if the royals cling to their historic policy of saying nothing in the hope that the waters will close over and the news agenda move on.

‘Never complain, never explain’ no longer cuts it in the social media age, and especially given what has been revealed about the behaviour of some members of the family.

Unless these reforms are made, the British monarchy will continue to stagger from one scandal to the next, shielded by its silence in the moment, but corrupted by that same secrecy in the longer term. If the Royal Family has nothing to hide, it has nothing to fear. But if it does not reform, it will not survive and neither will it deserve to.

• Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, by Andrew Lownie, is published by William Collins.
• Royal Mint, National Debt, by Norman Baker, is published by Biteback.