Dear King Charles, if you’re serious about
reforming the monarchy, this is how to start
Stephen
Bates
The hard work of being monarch now begins – and here
are five things you can do right now to improve things
Tue 20 Sep
2022 14.25 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/20/king-charles-reforming-monarchy-monarch
Dear King
Charles,
The
captains and the kings have departed, the last presidents and princes are
heading for the airport. After the funeral, the hard work of being monarch
begins.
The red
boxes are piling up, and Liz Truss will be dropping by for a weekly audience,
smugly patronising you. So what should your priorities be? If you are truly
serious about reforming the monarchy, here are five issues, helpfully offered,
to which you might (but probably won’t) bend your brain.
If you
really want to express solidarity with your subjects, particularly at a time of
economic hardship, you could add some additional tax payments. All right, yes,
you have paid income tax voluntarily since the age of 21, but large amounts of
the royal resources are exempt. The royal family have generally been extremely
reluctant to pay tax – they avoided income tax entirely from 1910 to 1994,
usually pleading poverty – and they still don’t have to pay inheritance or
corporation tax.
It is very
difficult to separate state assets – the stuff the royals cannot sell like the
crown jewels, the Rembrandts, the Rubenses and the 7,000 other paintings in the
royal collection, to say nothing of George V’s stamp collection, which is valued
in excess of £100m – but you do have private resources, such as those
professionally managed for you. And you do have the sovereign grant, currently
£86.3m, and 25% of the £312m current revenue of the crown estates, which gets
paid back to you by the government for carrying out your royal duties.
But you
have private assets too – and those are the ones we can only estimate, like
Balmoral and Sandringham with their large estates. The Sunday Times Rich List
reckoned this year that the Queen was worth £370m (way below the likes of
Richard Branson and Paul McCartney but not to be sneezed at). That would make
for a tidy inheritance tax bill on assets worth more than £500,000, but the
royals are exempt and the Queen’s will will be sealed – so we’ll never know
exactly what she’s passed on, unless you let a little light in on the magic.
You could call it levelling up.
A slimmed-down monarchy
You have
vowed to get rid of some of the flunkies, hangers-on and minor royals, though
that did not get off to a particularly good start when your staff at Clarence
House received notice of redundancy in the middle of last week , just as they
were working flat out on the transition arrangements for you. But slimming down
usually refers to the part-time royals who bulk out attendances at events and
get paid when they do so. The trouble is, there’s a bit of a labour shortage at
the moment, what with Prince Andrew sunk below the waterline and the Duke and
Duchess of Sussex in voluntary exile in the US. It puts a lot of work on the
royals who are left, such as you and Camilla, the Queen Consort, the Prince and
Princess of Wales, Prince Edward and Sophie and Princess Anne. Maybe you will
just have to cut back on royal visits.
Giving up Buckingham Palace
Why not?
It’s draughty and cold, falling to bits with chunks of masonry dropping off.
Grand but, well, just not very homely. There are 775 rooms, hundreds of
bedrooms and bedroom suites, 92 offices, 19 state rooms and a swimming pool and
the central London position would make it perhaps not a shelter for homeless
people, but an ideal luxury hotel. Trump Green Park, perhaps? It can’t actually
be sold, but perhaps could be leased out and hired back for special balcony
occasions and state dinners. Or, if that’s too drastic, why not open it to the
public all year round instead of just in the summer? There are hints you may
turn Balmoral into more of a museum than it is already.
Reforming the honours system
Do we
really still need the Order of the British Empire, or other imperial relics?
Couldn’t they be renamed something more inclusive? And while we’re at it, could
awards be given solely on merit, not to party donors, chief executives and
cronies of the prime minister? Such people don’t really need it to enhance
their status and stature (nor do film stars, sports heroes or other eye-catching
recipients, nice though it is to see their smiling faces in the media in the
dog days after Christmas). Longstanding nurses and cleaners may be less
glamorous, but more of them would certainly be worthier candidates, especially
for a government that supposedly wants to enhance their status without
necessarily paying for it.
Banning leaky pens
'I can't
bear this bloody thing': King Charles gets frustrated with leaky pen –
That’s
something you could definitely do, and an inky-fingered nation would rejoice.
If it’s true you take your pillow and toilet seat with you whenever you’re away
from home, surely you could take your own pen? You used a fountain pen for
those spiky black spider memos you used to write privately to ministers, but
perhaps you could have a decent ballpoint pen for those sudden signing sessions
without the risk of a pen malfunction incident. No one would notice. Promise.
Stephen
Bates is the Guardian’s former religious and royal correspondent. His latest
book is The Shortest History of the Crown.
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