Hoodwinked’ over Royal finances
The royal family’s income from the taxpayer has soared since the financial crisis, a Tortoise Investigation found last year. Now the UK’s former top civil servant says there’s been a deliberate attempt to keep the public in the dark
taxpayer-funded grant that brings the Queen almost £90 million a year is based on a “lie” designed to “hoodwink the public”, a former head of the civil service has said.
Sir Andrew Turnbull, the country’s most senior civil servant for three years under Prime Minister Tony Blair, told Tortoise that laws introduced by George Osborne to reform royal finances were a “classic smoke and mirrors arrangement….cooked up” by ministers and Buckingham Palace. “The thought was that (this arrangement) would hoodwink the public into thinking that the crown didn’t cost the nation anything because the crown was paying for itself. That was wrong.”
His comments will raise new questions about the close relationship between the government and the royal family. This week a Guardian investigation revealed that the Queen successfully lobbied the government to change a draft law to conceal her “embarrassing” private wealth from the public.
The Guardian’s work came six months after Tortoise published its own investigation into Royal Money. We found that the Queen’s public income had more than doubled since the financial crisis of 2008 – hitting £100 million in 2018-19 for the first time – and is set to rise by hundreds of millions of pounds thanks to windfalls from offshore wind farms. You can read the investigation here and listen to our slow newscast on royal money here.
www.tortoisemedia.com/2021/02/12/hoodwinked-over-royal-finances/
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