Don’t look now, but Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are returning to the United Kingdom and to the headlines. My reaction? As Valley Girls used to say, gag me with a fork.
I love London and St. Andrews, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, Chaucer and Shakespeare, the Beatles and the Stones. British food? Not so much. But everything else? I’m a confirmed Anglophile.
Except for the royals.
With apologies to my British friends, the royal family is the laziest, most overpaid, most overrated, most dysfunctional, greediest bunch of grifters this side of the U.S. House of Representatives.
And the most useless of all, the whiniest and most narcissistic of all the royals — and there’s a lot of competition for that title (I’m looking at you, former Prince Andrew) — are Harry and Meghan.
One of the biggest lies about the royals is that they benefit the U.K. through their selfless work on behalf of the British people. The second biggest lie is that they actually make money for the British economy through attracting tourism revenue.
Both arguments are demonstrably false. Look at the calendar of any of the so-called “working royals.” A few times a month, they’ll visit a hospital, a school, or a military base. The rest of the time, they’re lounging around. They spend far more time hunting and skiing than they do showing up for the average Briton. They actually count going to concerts, sporting events, and the theater as “work.” Nice work if you can get it.
The idea that the royals contribute financially through attracting tourists is also untrue. The oft-repeated claim is that the royals are worth 500 million pounds or $680 million U.S. annually to the British economy. This “fact” gets bandied about so often that everyone assumes it’s true. In fact, royal buildings attract tourists, not the royals themselves. If Britain became a republic tomorrow, tourists would still want to visit Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace. But tourist revenue wouldn’t decrease by a farthing.
Instead, the royals are a huge cost to the British public, which can ill afford the luxury of government welfare for a family that contributes practically nothing to society. The “Sovereign Grant” — the money Parliament allocates to pay for the royals’ luminous existences — is 138 million British pounds, or $188 million, this year. That’s a “salary” of roughly $17 million a year for the 11 so-called “working royals.”
But wait, there’s more. Factor in at least another 100 million pounds for security ($137 million). So we’re already over $300 million to house, feed, and protect these freeloaders. One anti-monarchy group, Republic, estimates the real number is more like 500 million pounds ($681 million). Just so that they can helicopter from one palace to the next as they please, on the taxpayers’ shilling.
What could Britain do with $681 million? They could hire 9,400 teachers, 14,000 nurses, and 14,000 firefighters. Or they could fund heating costs for 2,500,000 old-age pensioners. A lot better than spending the money on a dozen or so upper-class ne’er-do-wells.
Behind Buckingham Palace is a 39-acre park with more than a thousand trees and a 3.5-acre lake that serves exactly two people — the King and Queen. This land is in addition to all their properties around Britain — Balmoral, Windsor, Hampton Court, and so on. Conservative estimates suggest that if you turned that land into housing or office buildings, since it’s located in such a prime part of London, you could bring 10 billion (with a B) pounds (more than $13 billion, again with a B) into Britain’s badly strained coffers.
Even worse, much of the royals’ wealth can be traced back to the slave trade. The 18th-century British Kings Charles II and James II presided over the transport of more than 3 million enslaved Africans to the New World. Some slaves’ bodies were even branded “DY” which stands for Duke of York. Instead of those silly land proclamations in which silly Americans indulge — e.g., “This university was built on stolen land” — the British royals for centuries have actually enjoyed the financial benefits of their slavetrading forebears.
Nobody thinks about any of this. Instead, we’re all dazzled and even hypnotized by the pageantry of royal weddings, funerals, and investitures. We love seeing the Crown Jewels when we visit the Tower of London. Queen Elizabeth II was rightfully beloved as a figurehead of the nation, even as her husband, Prince Philip, got away with some of the nastiest, racist statements uttered by any latter-day public figure.
And so, for generation after generation, we keep giving the royals a pass.
So now Meghan and Harry are returning to England after having cashed in, to the tune of several hundred million dollars, on their royal pedigree. They apparently want to make peace with King Charles, 77, and suffering from cancer, which is commendable. They also have come to the realization that the further they stray from their royal roots, the less marketable they are in Hollywood. So spare me their crocodile tears for the aging monarch.
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In sum, there will always be a royal family because nobody does P.R. like the House of Windsor. Also, the average Brit seldom thinks about the financial and societal costs of welfare for the super wealthy. Maybe one day the social hypnosis will diminish, and British taxpayers will kick them out of their castles, hire all those nurses and teachers, develop the land behind Buckingham Palace, or at least open it up as a public park. But not while the charming William and Kate are warming up in the royal bullpen.
So now, with the return of Harry and Meghan, get ready for another round of distraction from any real questions about the British monarchy, which is increasingly a luxury that a woke, broke Britain can no longer afford.
Michael Levin is a two-time New York Times bestselling author.