Buckingham Palace launches gin to help overcome Covid losses

The Queen is known to be a gin fan, now the palace has its own brew, to help cover a Covid-led blowout in its finances.

Queen Elizabeth II is a fan of a gin cocktail. Picture: Getty

The Queen is known to be a quiet fan of a gin cocktail, and now her own garden at Buckingham Palace is providing essential ingredients for a quiet lunchtime tipple, and helping overcome a Covid-19 hole in the royal finances.

This week the Royal Collection Trust – which looks after the billion-dollar royal art collection and artefacts amassed from English kings and queens over the past 500 years – launched a special gin to help claw back extensive losses from the Covid-19 lockdown of Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

Already the Royal Collection Trust has taken out a £22m ($40m) loan to offset losses expected to be around £30m this year and has made hundreds of staff redundant after the royal palaces were closed to tourists from March.

 

The Royal Collection Trust said: “The Covid-19 pandemic has posed by far the greatest challenge to Royal Collection Trust in the charity’s history.

“The closure to the public has had a very significant and serious impact on our finances, as we are entirely funded by visitor income from admissions and related retail sales.”

Notwithstanding the public and private incomes of the Royals, the launch of a £40 bottle of gin, derived from 12 botanicals including the lemon verbena, hawthorn berries, bay leaves and mulberry leaves from the Buckingham Palace garden, is designed to help the charity’s finances.

It is an appropriate Royal connection as The Queen, in a nod to her gin-loving mother, the late Queen Mother, is said to enjoy an occasional gin with Dubonnet, the sweet fortified wine aperitif.

The Buckingham Palace gin is packaged in a pretty turquoise bottle with a coronet and flowers label, a gold-coloured stopper and a sketch of Buckingham Palace.

The charity says the gin will be sold to the public and also will be served at Buckingham Palace official functions following the reopening on July 23.

While sections of the Royal palaces are expected to lower the drawbridge to the public later this month, the four month shuttering, accompanied by a drop in investment income, including vast property investments, has rocked the royal finances.

Vice Admiral Tony Johnstone-Burt, master of the Royal household, announced in an email to staff this month: “We may not be fully operational across all of our various activities until 2021.

“As a result we have had to start considering some very difficult decisions.”

The Queen, estimated to be worth about £350m, receives a Sovereign grant to pay for official duties and upkeep of Buckingham Place. Last year the grant was £82m, including £33m for renovation to the Palace.

The Prince of Wales’s income from the Duchy of Cornwall – the near 700-year-old private estate established by Edward III in 1337 to fund the heir to the throne – is about £22m a year.