King Charles worries about money.
He has been wearing the same coat for four decades. He keeps a bag of scraps of material for repairing clothes. Leftovers are never thrown out. On hearing the wondrous news that Meghan, now The Duchess of Sussex had agreed to trade an ensemble part on a cable show to marry Prince Harry, Charles said, according to Harry’s memoir Spare, “There’s not enough money to go around …. I can’t pay for anyone else.”
Bet Meghan is looking like a bargain now that His Majesty has been lumped with a new, much more expensive dependent: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
The former Prince of the Blood, member of the Order of the Garter and Tatler’s most wanted party guest 1999 – Newly arrested, reviled, and with at least nine separate UK police forces assessing reports linking him to Epstein, Andrew’s uppance has finally come.
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One thing he’s not is cheap, with the royal ultimate bill, in the last few years and looking ahead, coming to $73.5 million.
If you add in his decade as the UK’s official trade ambassador, then the total cost of Andrew jumps to $113 million.
Let’s break it down, shall we?
$22 million + an unknown lawyers’ bill
No one knows what it cost in legal fees for the six months Andrew spent fighting Virginia Giuffre’s 2021 New York civil court case, in which she alleged he had sexually assaulted her on three occasions (claims he has always denied). We’re talking tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The big hit came in February 2022, when the royal family had a whip round and got out a monogrammed chequebook to silence Ms Giuffre and to make the problem go away. They paid her a reported $22 million to settle the case, with no omission of liability from Andrew.
$28.6 million
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Before that it was the lucky British taxpayers who had to pony up to fund Andrew.
For a decade he was the UK’s official trade ambassador and the privilege of having Andrew whizzing off around the world in first class gobbling peanuts and demanding warm towels in return for deigning to stand in the same room as members of the Baku chamber of commerce cost the UK government $28.6 million.
He not only charged the British people for his travel, hiring whole floors of five-star hotels for his retinue including a private secretary, an equerry, a valet and a clerk and a security team and regularly hired private jets but even allegedly put his massages on expenses.
Stinting was clearly not in his vocabulary like, ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘no more pud’. For example, just one weekend repping the UK in Davos cost UK taxpayers as much as $78,000.
In 2011, having been booted out of his trade envoy job over his ties to Epstein, it was revealed that the total cost of his decade in the trade envoy post had cost $26.6 million.
$60 million and counting
But all this could be dwarfed by what Andrew could cost the King going forward.
Charles has made clear that he will privately fund his brother, including paying for his legal costs, meaning that the lawyers of London should start seriously deciding on which diamond-encrusted Rolexes they might want to buy. Why not get two? They will be able to afford it.
If there is one thing that the 67-year-old is in desperate need of right now, besides a new-found requirement for clinical grade antiperspirant, it will be legal heavyweights. Very, very expensive, charging-by-the-hour solicitors and wigs who should whack on extra to make boggy Norfolk house calls.
How much could this cost? You’d have to think hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions.
Next, Charles is going to have to keep Toad of Marsh Farm alive for decades to come. Should he live as long as mother, father and grandmother, he’s got a good 30 years left – so that’s 30 years of housing and staff costs and someone paying for his weekly delivery of bulk buy Jaffa cakes.
Prior to late 2024, Andrew received a privately funded allowance from the royal family, which has been put at somewhere between about $500,000 and $2 million annually.
It is reported that the King will now dole out only a vastly reduced sum for his brother to live on but still, it would have to be a six figure sum.
Then are his bodyguards. His Majesty will have to pay for the poor blighted ex-SAS commandos whose job it will be to safeguard Andrew from being pelted with rotten fruit should he ever dare step foot in his local Pizza Express.
Andrew’s security bill, when he lived at his former home Royal Lodge, was about $5.7 million every year. Again, the new sum will likely be much lower but there will surely still be a hell of a lot of zeros required.
Add this all up and do we think that between staff, an allowance and security he will be costing the King less than a good $2 million annually? That over the course of the rest of his life would mean about $60 million – before lawyers’ fees.
Finding the coin for all this will fall to Charles. Lucky he’s got that bag of material scraps standing by and is happy to heat reheated Shepherds Pie for the third night in a row. And lucky that his personal wealth has grown by hundreds of millions of dollars in the last few years, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.
Hindsight’s a funny thing. The $178,000 that Meghan reportedly spent on new clothes in 2019, her only full year of royalling? What an absolute steal. The King didn’t know how good he had it.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.news.com.au ’
