Prince Harry could lose out on King Charles ‘windfall’
Details about what the late Queen left each of her children in her will bodes badly for the Duke of Sussex down the track.
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One of Freud’s theories is that humans need two things to be happy; love and work. Prince Andrew, the Duke of York has neither.
His days of charming Bahraini gas tycoons and toting his valet (while his valet toted an ironing board, seriously) around the fleshpots of central Asia are long past.
And the second part, well, he has had ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York shacked up in a lesser sixth guest bedroom for 16 years.
Now, the lot of the disgraced spare has only gotten worse with a recent Times report revealing that the 64-year-old failed to receive any sort of “windfall” from his mother, the late Queen’s, will.
Though the sovereigns will remains under lock and key and court order never to be revealed, when they die, their estate goes to their heir.
Now before the entire world cackles with and indulges in some well-deserved schadenfreude, this Andrew situation raises an obvious question – what might this mean for his nephew, a fellow duke cut loose?
Because if the template followed by the her late Majesty is anything to go by then, Prince William looks set to only become wealthier and weather, and able to buy his children those 24K gold pencils by the gross, while Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex could end up receiving, comparatively, crumbs. (And having to buy their tots hand-milled 2B pencils from a small producer in Oregon.)
The Prince of Wales is already far, far (let me chuck in here another drawled out ‘faaar’) wealthier than his younger brother.
The Duchy of Cornwall, the trust that is tied to the Wales title, currently comes with an annual payout of about $45 million a year.
By contrast, Harry was reportedly paid about $30 million for Spare and the Sussexes, according to the Daily Mail, and banked only about $22.5 million for their Netflix docuseries.
Therefore, in the nearly two years since William was elevated to this position, he has picked up nearly $90 million – which is nearly twice as much as the amount reportedly pocketed by Harry and Meghan for these, their biggest money-spinners.
This picture could one day become even more dramatically skewed and to understand why, we have to talk about many people’s least favourite member of the royal family.
Despite Andrew being his mother, the late Queen’s reported favourite child, the bulk of her late Majesty’s $1.2 billion personal fortune went to her eldest son and P-plate throne-sitter King Charles.
While it is hard to imagine that the late Queen would not have made some provisions for her three other children – Princess Anne, smarmy Andy Pandy and Prince Edward – and left them something, that ‘something’ could have been totally and utterly dwarfed by Charles’ towering stacks of inherited cash.
Just in case a hereditary monarchy, a system built on the foundational principle of inherent inequity, was not unfair enough, well, ta da!
Thus let us look ahead, hopefully decades from now, to the sad day when our centenarian King toddles off to lecture Saint Michael about the benefits of well-tended herbaceous borders and consider what might become of his personal wealth.
Assuming that the $1.2 billion of personal fortune left to Charles is invested well and will only grow, that means we could face a situation where William will only become more stupendously wealthy while Harry is left with ‘something’.
The lopsidedness of how things have, and could well continue to, shake out financially only exacerbates the undeniable inequality of William and Harry’s positions. Sometimes I wonder not so much how they fell out as if there was ever any real fighting chance of them not doing so.
Every time some great moment of upheaval has hit the royal family, William has gotten, and will possibly continue to get, more and more zeros added to his bank balance while Harry’s inheritance will amount to some sentimental Lladro porcelain dog figures and a comparatively tiddly cheque.
(In addition to all of this, when William becomes King, he will switch over to receiving funds from Duchy of Lancaster estate, worth $45 million a year, and will be in control of the $164 million annual sovereign grant money which can only be used official expenses like office staff and preventing the Tower of London crumbling into the Thames.)
Harry and Meghan’s fortunes, for the rest of their lives, now rest on their talents and creative and entrepreneurial output and whether those scratchies the Duke keeps buying come through.
Not only do the Duke and Duchess have to pay their own way but they are doing so without anything like the unthinkably large financial safety net that the Waleses enjoy, and remember they don’t have to pay for their own security.)
Clearly there are some things the Duke and Duchess can do that are proven means of getting cash registers ringing.
Spare is the fastest selling non-fiction book of all time and was the number one selling book in the UK that year, shifting 700,000 copies there alone. Their Harry & Meghan series, at launch, topped the Netflix charts.
But for the past 18 months the Sussexes have shown no interest in reopening old family wounds for us, the voyeurist, vulturish public, or to continue with the royal revelations and psychic sore-picking. For the Duke and Duchess’ own mental health, if nothing else, this surely would have to be for the best.
But what is untested is their ability to match those commercial successes with their independent, royal-free projects.
There is an alternate financial reality for Harry and Meghan here too, one where they don’t have to wake up everyday and answer emails from harried Netflix execs expecting them to sing for their seven-figure suppers.
The Times has also reported that the King gives Andrew a yearly $1.9 million allowance and pays his $5.7 million in annual security costs, which, you would have to assume is the sort of deal His Majesty might have doled out to Sussexes if they had stayed put and not started talking about content deals.
While that is a lot of lovely free money, again, just to really belabour the point, that hardly matches up to the $1.2 billion plus estate that will go to William, as the heir, if the current format holds.
This shedload is in addition to the $45 million he collects each year from the Duchy of Lancaster estate.
It’s also sepatate to the $164 million annual sovereign grant which helps with official expenses like office staff and preventing the Tower of London crumbling into the Thames and not, say, his mahogany bird feeder-buyer budget.
So too, in this alternate scenario, Harry and Meghan would have had to watch on as the houses, tiaras, jewellery, crowns and cars afforded to William and Kate got grander and bigger and more carat-filled.
Meanwhile, they would likely have remained at Frogmore Cottage, hemmed in with their only five bedrooms and without even a yew maze or indoor Olympic-length pool to their name.
At least we can say this about the Sussexes, by Freud’s definition, they should be very happy. They have love and they have work and they have something precious that William never will – real independence. I’m not sure who got the better deal.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Prince Harry could lose out on King Charles ‘windfall’
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