How much money will the coronation of King Charles III cost the British public? What tax rate will our new king pay on his private income? How many engagements did “working royals” such as the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent attend over the last five years? How much were they paid? How much rent do Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, who are not working royals, pay for residences in royal palaces?
In recent weeks, the Guardian has posed all of these questions to Buckingham Palace. The responses boil down to “ask someone else”, “work it out for yourself”, or simply “you have no right to know”. We beg to differ.
Obituaries of Queen Elizabeth II uniformly applauded her calm stewardship of the realm, or her supposed non-interference in British politics. None mentioned another hallmark of her reign: entrenched secrecy, which has given rise to a culture in which the British people are deprived of the most basic information about the monarchy.
Correspondence with the monarch or the heir, whether seismic or harmless, is banned from disclosure. Parliamentary criticism of conduct of royal family members, no matter how disgraced, is prohibited. The palace says the royal archives – the repository of our constitutional monarchy’s history – are open to “any serious researcher”. However they are the private property of the Windsors, who grant their permission before researchers can examine them.
Nowhere is the refusal to let the light in more fiercely enforced by the royals than over financial matters. The wills of even obscure members of the family are censored by judicial decree. The royals closely guard the secrets of their financial wealth, insisting it is “private” even when it is clearly born of their public roles.
It should not detract from Elizabeth II’s achievements to observe how this addiction to secrecy allowed the most unacceptable and corrosive practices to take root. In the past three years, official papers uncovered by the Guardian have revealed how the Queen and her advisers repeatedly abused the procedure of crown consent to secretly alter British laws, including, in 1973, as part of a successful bid to conceal her “embarrassing” private wealth from the public.
Until at least 1968, and very probably after, Elizabeth II’s household did not appoint “coloured immigrants or foreigners” to clerical roles, although they were permitted to work as domestic servants. Even today, Buckingham Palace insists it only complies with non-discrimination law voluntarily. Does the king approve of this? What other abuses have yet to be revealed? And how are they going to come to light when the monarchy is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FoI)?
Today, the Guardian is launching Cost of the crown, an investigation into royal wealth and finances. In the coming days and weeks, our reporting will reveal information in the public interest about the fortunes that have been quietly amassed by the royals by dint of their public function. Our reporting will also demonstrate the vast challenge of obtaining answers to the most simple of questions.
Take, for example, the question of how much public money is spent on security for the royal family. The government, so often the monarch’s ally over matters of secrecy, claims that to disclose even just a single totalised figure for the entire family, without any further details whatsoever, would constitute an unacceptable threat to their safety.
It refuses to explain this reasoning in any detail, or why heads of state in other developed countries, including French and US presidents, can publish details about the costs of their security.
Instead, an FoI request to disclose the security costs of British royals was rejected, first by the Home Office and then, on appeal, by the Information Commissioner’s Office – forcing the Guardian to instruct lawyers last month to bring a further appeal at the information tribunal. To say it will take months to get an answer would be optimistic.
It took our colleague Rob Evans 10 years and a trip to the supreme court to secure the release under FoI of Prince Charles’s “black spider memos”, which showed how the heir to the throne lobbied senior government ministers on everything from badger culling to alternative herbal medicines. The government spent more than £400,000 on legal costs in an ultimately failed bid to keep the memos secret.
This is not merely a problem for journalists. Academics, biographers, archivists, activists, curious citizens and even parliamentarians seeking basic information are denied clear answers. Rory Cormac and Richard Aldrich, historians of Britain’s intelligence services, are well acquainted with official secrecy where it is warranted.
“Richard and I have both spent our entire careers trying to write histories of MI5 and MI6,” Cormac said. “We completely understand the need for secrecy around intelligence services. We spend our time going through archives, trying to piece together snippets of declassified material, to arrive at something historically rigorous. We think the intelligence services are the secret state. But they are like WikiLeaks compared to the royal family.”
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How hard are the royals working for their money?
In 1993, John Major’s government published an open government white paper that was ahead of its time in setting out a vision for an informed citizenry, including on royal matters. It declared: “Records relating to the royal family will be treated in the same way as all other records.”
The previous year, Elizabeth II acknowledged in a speech to the City of London’s Guildhall that “no institution – City, monarchy, whatever – should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty”.
The clarity of those commitments makes the secrecy in the ensuing decades all the more striking. One stark example is the creation of the sovereign grant, the funding settlement introduced in 2011 by David Cameron’s coalition government.
The previous system for funding the royals, a device called the civil list, had been in operation since the 18th century. For all its flaws, it provided parliament with a breakdown of how much money each member of the family was to be paid. And it gave the elected representatives of the British people a regular chance to debate how much taxpayer money should be handed over to the unelected monarch.
Under the sovereign grant, public funding for the royals is set as a proportion of the profits of the crown estate. It has proved to be a financial coup for the royals, who had surrendered the crown estate in 1760.
The Windsors no longer have to endure the civil list ritual of parliamentarians debating how much they should receive. The settlement has proved generous (£86m this year) and an expected windfall in crown estate profits has put the king in the enviable position of having to ask for a reduction in future payments.
Yet our attempt to discover precisely what public functions royals have fulfilled in return for all this money is less than straightforward. The palace directed reporters to the Court Circular, the official record of their activities. However, the information is only available in daily editions, with no totals and no way of easily searching what engagements royals have undertaken in recent years.
To work this out, we first had to drive to the village of Datchet in Berkshire, and the home of Tim O’Donovan, an amiable retired insurance broker who has spent the past 44 years compiling his own paper records of these engagements; archives that he generously agreed to share. We commissioned a team of software engineers to build a machine-learning program to read as many of the circulars as have been digitised and ask it to analyse them in an effort to find answers.
If the UK is going have a royal family as its head of state, surely its citizens should have easier access to information about what exactly they do for them?
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What is kept secret from the British public?
The disparity between how we treat regular public figures and those who happen to have royal blood is made plain when they die. Under British law wills are public, partly to prevent fraud or malpractice by executors. However, the wills of the royal family are routinely sealed by judges. The historical event that gave rise to this custom was the cover-up of a royal sex scandal.
Until 1911, Windsor family wills – other than those of a monarch – were public, like any other British family. The judiciary began censoring them at the request of Queen Mary after the death of her brother, Francis of Teck, in order to conceal from the public his decision to bequeath jewels to a woman with whom he was having an affair.
“Queen Mary wanted them back again,” explains Michael Nash, a lecturer in British constitution at the University of East Anglia. “She called in her legal advisers and she said: I want nobody to know about this. So the will was sealed.”
Members of the family have been able to request their wills be hidden, on account of their bloodline, ever since. Official papers reveal senior government officials seriously doubted the legal basis for this process half a century ago, but it has continued unabated.
After the death of Prince Philip in 2021, the president of the family court, Sir Andrew McFarlane, held a secret hearing from which the media were in effect excluded. The judge went further than ruling that just Philip’s will should be sealed, announcing that the wills of all senior royals should henceforth be secret for a minimum of 90 years.
McFarlane did not fully explain how he reached this 90-year figure in the judgment; it exceeds the normal level of secrecy applied to government papers almost five times over. It means that if Catherine, Princess of Wales, survives as long as her grandfather-in-law, her will cannot be unsealed until the year 2171. Once that period has elapsed, her will could be disclosed to the public. But only, following McFarlane’s ruling, with the Windsors’ permission.
When McFarlane’s judgment was made public, the Guardian hired lawyers to mount a legal challenge – not over the decision to seal the will, but over the media’s exclusion from the hearing, on the grounds it was contrary to the principle of open justice. We lost the case, after the court of appeal ruled that the media did not have the right to be notified about it.
In their ruling, the judges observed that publicity of the court hearing would have compromised the need to preserve the dignity of the queen and her family’s privacy.
McFarlane’s ruling is being cited by the National Archives to justify banning researchers from other public records discussing the royal family’s wealth. Four files sought by the Guardian concerning bequests of obscure members of the family – Helen, Duchess of Albany; Alastair, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn; Princess Victoria, and Princess Arthur of Connaught – are now sealed.
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Challenging questions for the king
Last year, the veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby, who helmed the BBC commentary of the queen’s funeral, broke with custom to advance an opinion that some might categorise as political. Speaking at a literary festival, he complained about Buckingham Palace’s attempts to steer the state broadcaster’s coverage, and complained that the BBC had an “old sore about the monarchy”.
The corporation, he said, “would not go near things like the power that the palace has to change taxation legislation”, or ask whether the Duchy of Cornwall, a business portfolio that controversially generates profits for the Prince of Wales, should pay tax.
“All those issues are never touched by the BBC because I think they feel their viewers will not like it – a visceral feeling,” he said. “It is not discourteous to question, it is not rude, it is important, because the way we are governed is important, and the way our constitution works is important.”
In the coming weeks, the Cost of the crown series will ask challenging questions of the new king. Questions about the personal enrichment of his family, and the extent to which they have profited from their public roles. Questions about the dubious origins of some of their wealth. And questions about whether the public is getting value for money for the record sums it gives over each year to fund the Windsors and their lavish lifestyle.
Buckingham Palace argues that the financial arrangements of royals should “remain private, as they would for any other individual”. But the mist that shrouds such questions comes from the confusion over what can legitimately be called the royals’ private wealth, what belongs to the British people, and what, as so often is the case, ambiguously straddles the two.
These are not easy topics for King Charles to confront. He may prefer that we were not raising them on the eve of his coronation. But we believe the time is right.
• Cost of the crown reporting team: David Pegg, Rob Evans, Maeve McClenaghan, Felicity Lawrence, Henry Dyer, Severin Carrell, Manisha Ganguly, Rupert Neate, Greg Wood, Harry Davies, David Conn, Aamna Mohdin, Lucy Hough, Maya Wolfe-Robinson and Richard Nelsson.
