At last, an economic policy we can all get behind – doubling the royal family’s funding
But with rumours about a certain workshy Windsor circulating this week, are we actually encouraging joblessness with an overly generous safety net?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/26/economic-policy-royal-family-funding-windsor
Finally, some part of our struggling state is getting a massive budget increase – and it’s not even the welfare bill, like normal. Or maybe it is? The monarchy’s core funding is going to double to £100m. Also mentioned under cover of the same info dump is the fact that the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace is currently coming in at £369m, but the King and Queen don’t want to live there when it’s done.
Personally, I’m a big fan of the gaiety the Windsors add to this nation, willingly or otherwise, but I do worry: are we enabling a culture of dependence that isn’t actually great for any of the people involved? Does the royal economy need rebalancing, if it is simply impossible to own an absolutely vast private network of land and high-end properties without somehow still needing a top-up from the state? You’ve heard of the poverty trap – will no one think of the royalty trap?
Maybe the Windsors would argue their sovereign grant counts as “in-work benefits”, given their royal duties. But looking at some numbers circulated by the former MP Norman Baker this week, one has to wonder if we are actually discouraging work with an overly generous safety net. According to Baker’s research, Prince William has done 57 royal engagements so far this year, which doesn’t feel like the shift we might expect from an able-bodied – if mental-health-obsessed – 44-year-old man, while the King, who is 77 and has cancer, has done 76. Princess Anne is beating the pack yet again with 100. She’d be fine, but by rights William would have quite a sticky call with his Jobcentre Plus work coach, and would be more likely to pick up a sanction than a doubling of benefits.
I appreciate that in the summer months in particular, there is a flood of migrant royals to this country and they very ostentatiously just do nothing. It must be galling for William to have to get up on a couple of mornings a week and trudge towards a ribbon to cut, while some arsehole foreign prince is just lying in bed till noon before revving a Bugatti round Mayfair then mooching back to the hotel to carry out a couple of sexual assaults. I get it. The perception of unfairness matters, and many royals feel it keenly. I remember reading the tech author Evgeny Morozov describing a scene his literary agent had allegedly witnessed in Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion, where the then Prince Andrew and his sex case friend were getting foot massages from a couple of Russian girls. Andrew was complaining how other royals had it so much better than him. “In Monaco,” he reportedly said, “Albert works 12 hours a day, but at 9pm, when he goes out, he does whatever he wants, and nobody cares. But, if I do it, I’m in big trouble.”
I know what you’re thinking – wait: when did this waste of space ever do a 12-hour week, let alone a 12-hour day? But set your eyerolls aside. The politics of envy benefits no one. Andrew was big on how vital it is to encourage enterprise. In this case, an international sex trafficking enterprise (unknowingly, according to his denial) – but I think we’re supposed to get the point.
As I say, William talks a lot about mental health, so it’s possible he’s one of the 1.3 million and rising working-age adults with limited or no capacity to work for mental health reasons. Yet work brings so many benefits, from dignity to purpose to being able to buy your own stuff, and I worry that William could be ushering in a turbocharged era of intergenerational dependence, where the royals become people who don’t really work because they didn’t see their parents doing it. Then again, it’s perfectly possible that William does work more than that engagement tally indicates, only for himself, rather than the nation. Some say he has deprioritised public engagements in favour of boosting his private finances. After all, he is not – how to put this? – economically inactive, because the other revelation this week is that he paid £7.76m in tax last year, after an entirely opaque number of deductions. The King paid £12.9m, which, reports inform us, places him in the top 100 UK taxpayers.
(Sidebar: that glimpse of the surprisingly little it takes, in the context of the super-rich, to be in the top 100 taxpayers tells its own story. Every time I read a stat like that I wish to offer a personal note of thanks to every chancellor, Labour and Conservative, who ballooned Britain’s tax code to a ludicrous 23,000-plus pages – the longest in the world – and made it a charter for avoidance at the highest levels. All of this was a choice, made by successive chancellors, and whether they understood the choice they were making – you’d hope they did, given their job – the outcome is the same. Many more big-hitters get around it.)
Anyway, back to the main event. The royal family are treated as a sort of zero-sum game, a brand asset so valuable to the nation that almost any crazy price hike ought to be approved because of soft power and tourism and whatnot. And yet, I can’t help feeling you could very much have the soft power and the tourism and the whatnot with a somewhat less outrageous funding model. Not to be vulgar, but how does Charles’s “slimmed down” monarchy now seem to cost twice what the bloated one did?
Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to Be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com.
It’s a truly Trumpian tragedy: he’s made billions of dollars but can’t buy love or respect
Potus pocketed over $2.2bn last year – but with an algae-filled reflecting pool and his State Fair a fiasco, what price happiness?
From certain angles, it might appear as if President Trump is having a tough month. He messed up the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, which he blamed on acts of vandalism no one has been able to stand up. The supreme court rejected both his bid to appeal against the $5m (£3.8m) civil judgment against him for defaming and sexually abusing E Jean Carroll, and his executive order to end birthright citizenship. And the war with Iran keeps rumbling on. And yet, after Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure report was released on Tuesday, headlines drew attention to the fact the president made more than $2.2bn in revenue in 2025 – more than three times what he pulled in the year before his inauguration. Contrary to appearances, perhaps everything is going exactly to plan.
It is always a question with Trump as to how much the wealth he has accrued in his second term in office is the spoils of strategy rather than the lucky result of his scattergun but industrial-scale hustle. Looking at the numbers in his financial report, one is reminded that before he became president, Trump piloted a series of failed businesses – six of which declared bankruptcy – and gave every indication of being a lousy businessman. It’s often pointed out that if Trump had simply invested the vast inheritance left to him by Fred Trump, his father, in a standard tracker fund, he would’ve made more money than through his lacklustre business career, and there’s nothing to suggest this was likely to change.
That was before his second presidency, of course. Now he and his children are sitting on top of a huge fortune, large parts of which seem to have come from sources with interests in sucking up to the president. As the New York Times points out, a large chunk of Trump’s $2.2bn windfall last year came from an investment firm with ties to the United Arab Emirates, which bought an almost 50% stake in his crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and which is part of an industry over which Trump has policy-making and regulatory influence.
Similarly, the report registers the smaller but still significant revenue streams generated by Trump’s side hustle in defamation and other lawsuits, including settlements with ABC ($16m), Meta ($24.5m) and Paramount ($16m) – legal proceedings which, it seems fair to assume, these media and tech companies may have had more appetite for fighting had the plaintiff not been the president of the United States with vast influence over their industries.
All of which leaves Trump in the strange position of, on the one hand, getting the thing he has always desperately wanted in life – genuine, unimaginable wealth – at a cost of the other thing he has always desperately wanted in life, universal admiration and applause. This trade-off is so morally neat it might’ve come from a fable, but that is where the US president currently finds himself. Rich but mocked; successful, if you look at his income, but an absolute turkey of a leader with a 39% approval rating and an image so tarnished that even Giorgia Meloni, the unpopular rightwing leader of Italy and former absolute lickspittle to Trump, has felt emboldened to have a crack.
As with most petulant personalities, it’s likely to be the small failures that niggle most with Trump. While his famous deal-making abilities continue to field poor results in the Middle East, the president seems to have turned himself inside out trying to explain away the algae currently blooming in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. It’s a tiny, irrelevant failure as these things go, but with optics so bad, so glaringly unmissable even to those with no interest in Iran – here is a man who can’t even keep the nation’s pond clean – he’s had to drum up endless wild stories to excuse it.
Likewise, Trump’s predictably terrible oversight of something called the Great American State Fair. You’ve probably not even heard of it, despite the fact it is going on right now on the National Mall in Washington DC, and has been advertised by the White House as a 16-day extravaganza to mark the country’s 250th birthday with “a world-class exposition”. Or, as it turns out, with an empty food hall, unpeopled exhibitions and television’s Dr Oz addressing a half-empty field in a setup that looks dodgier than that so-bad-it-became-an-instant-classic Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow.
It’s Trump’s reverse Midas touch, of course, which wrecks everything he touches outside his family’s crypto holdings and which, as support for him wanes even in his former strongholds, must be tearing his ego, divided as it is between the primary motivations of money and praise, clean in two. If only he were a character from fiction – an Elizabethan tragedy, say, or an episode of Captain Underpants – it would be fascinating and grimly hilarious to watch this play out.
