One family gets more housing benefit, free cars, and state help than any other, says Fleet Street Fox. If they don’t want to be deported they need to clean up their act
Benefits cheats. Dodgy deals behind closed doors. The cost of living. Lying to the public. Hiking tax rates to pay for people who rarely get off their arses. In the wake of the toughest Budget in years, these are the issues driving the country round the twist this week.
Throw a brick, and the chances are you’ll find someone who thinks “feckless” means someone poor who has too many children they cannot afford to look after, that they procreate simply so they can stay on the take, and all the decent hard-working people are slaving to pay for it.
And they’re not wrong. The only trouble is, it’s not someone in a vest or athleisure wear.. There’s next to no fake eyelashes, the children aren’t called DeNiro or Tyson, and if one of these grifters knocked on your door the chances are you’d bow and scrape and consider your ‘umble ‘ome unworthy of them.
If I told you just ONE troubled family was costing us hundreds of millions of pounds a year, they can’t hold down a proper job, and we’re paying for gold-plated benefit packages, why, you’d want their name, address, and the magistrate, in that order. And if I told you they’ve recently arrived from Greece, via Denmark and Germany, you might wonder why the hell they didn’t settle in one of those places instead.
The Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenbergs are to be found mostly in the Thames Valley, from where they occasionally foray to disrupt the daily functions of a hospice, school, or community project. While the provision of Motability cars to the disabled has recently caused some Parliamentary consternation, there appears to be little political capital to be made from complaining they undertake these visits only if they can be conducted by helicopter or a fleet of bomb-proof luxury cars.
Recent revelations as a result of the Freedom of Information Act have uncovered more than one of this family running a surprisingly simple housing benefits operation. It goes like this: they get married, and ask for a house. They are given a stately home so massive Victoria Beckham would consider it ostentatious. They pay a nominal sum, with money of uncertain origin which they did not earn, for a lease that will last two lifetimes upon which they pay (and I am not joking, Americans) a peppercorn. Presumably, once they have despatched a servant to find one.
One member of the family – the only one to really ever hold down a job for any length of time, which seems to have involved a lot of seamen – got a £30m mansion in Windsor that way, paying £7m which he got from who-knows-where. Now we know his younger brother performed a similar move, with his company paying £5m for a 150-year lease on a Surrey pile called Bagshot Park, and which is now worth at least six times that.
The owners had two other offers, to turn it into a hotel or a conference centre, which would have provided revenue for the taxpayer, Both were turned down, citing restrictions on land use. Instead they gave it to its current tenant, who has contributed just a quarter of £4m renovation costs, and who is free to sell it on himself at a massive profit. It’s not clear how the whole thing has been funded, but I’ll bet you good money that Rachel Reeves’ £7,500 a year mansion tax has gone down like a cup of cold sick.
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The hunt is now on for which other members of the family have similar deals, which may have done the taxpayer out of millions of revenue over the course of their lifetimes. Some siblings have multiple homes, and they all have a minimum of two children, sometimes three or four. The head of the family owns private homes in Gloucestershire, Norfolk, Romania and Scotland, but we’ve given him a rent-free deal on two in London, one just outside the M25, and three more in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And his wife’s got her own house too! This family gets more housing benefit than any other in the land.
Now there are some soft-hearted, woke, liberal do-gooders who say this family are really jolly lovely, and they do an awful lot for charity, and won’t someone think of the tourists. To which I say, we’d get more tourists if we could open up the palaces year-round, like the French do. All the country mansions would probably turn us a pretty penny in hotel rooms, too. And those good causes seem, for the most part, to have come into being before the patronage of these people, whose publicly-funded good works never seem to be done for more than two or three days a week.
Why does a family of four require a 120-room mansion? How do couples that spend their time volunteering find the means to run stables full of pedigree nags? Why, for the love of Pete WHY, are two cars not enough?
There are reports some of them wonder around their homes switching off the lights, as though it is endearingly frugal. The fact they do this in houses packed with more servants than family members, police officers earning overtime, and Ministry of Defence-funded equerries to polish their shoes never seems to get a second glance.
Some will say it is class envy, or Communism, or that’s Foxy’s knighthood in the bin. But at a time when the state is cutting back on support for many who struggle to keep one roof over their heads, it seems bizarre to happily fund those who feel entitled to two or three. And with a variety of thrusting politicians talking about deportation, removing the right to remain, and eroding all the paths to citizenship which every family has benefited from for years, it might be worth pointing out that the family which holds the entire British state together is a recent import – just like many of those it is fashionable to demonise.
There are sound arguments for retaining a monarchy, if only to deny a future presidency to someone who cannot comprehensively deny saying “Hitler was right” to a Jewish schoolboy. But if they are not bound by the same rules of social acceptability as the rest of us, they will be as doomed as the Bourbons, and I don’t mean the biscuits. Edward, Sophie, and two children do not require a 120-room mansion that could be turning a profit as a hotel. Andrew should be rehomed at his own expense, Kate and William should pick a house and stick with it, and Anne should probably be made a government minister in the Lords, now that Baroness Trumpington is no more.
It is clear this family should be housed somewhere baying mobs with torches cannot easily access. They are terror targets, and require protection. But they don’t merit all the medals, and they do not have enough friends or carers to require 30 bedrooms a-piece. They should do what every single one of us is doing, and cut their cloth to suit – one police outrider, one valet, one bodyguard, one housekeeper, would be enough for most. If the Mountatten-Windsor rebrand is to achieve its goal of normalising, Anglicising and refining Royalty for the next century, then a little more frugality, and a great deal more public scrutiny, will be in their best interests as well as ours.
