It’s been a bad few days for royals. On Sunday (November 3), Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia were pelted with mud and eggs and met with a hundreds-strong crowd chanting “murderers” and “shame” during a visit to the flood-ravaged town of Paiporta. More than 200 people were killed in flash flooding which tore through the Valencia region last week; locals are enraged as they believe there was a lack of warning and insufficient support from the authorities after the deadly floods. In one video, one protestor can be heard shouting at the king: “Nobody did anything to avoid this.”
Meanwhile, over here on our sad, sad little island, a joint investigation by The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches published on Saturday (November 2) revealed that King Charles and Prince William fund their lifestyles via an expansive ancient property empire. The investigation found that the King and Prince own 5,410 plots of land through their private fiefdoms, the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall.
The duchies make millions of pounds a year by charging government departments, councils, businesses, mining companies and even charities, as well as the general public, commercial rents and feudal levies on this land, operating as commercial landlords while having a special agreement with the Treasury which exempts them from paying tax on their corporate profits.
Chillingly, Charles and William even charge taxpayer-funded services such as the army, the navy, the NHS, the prison service and state schools to use the duchies’ land, rivers and seashores. To give one example, a London NHS Trust is expected to pay the King £11 million over 15 years for ambulance parking at a duchy warehouse. In addition, William – who has just launched a big PR campaign dedicated to ending homelessness – owns over 600 properties, with The Mirror claiming that some of his tenants are living in homes riddled with damp and black mould.
All in all, not a good week for their PR. It’s giving feudalism. It’s giving tyranny. It’s giving medieval. The land the royals are living off was, according to The Times, literally “seized by medieval monarchs”. But if the royals want to act like we’re still living in the 14th century, so should we. Maybe we in the UK should take a leaf out of Spain’s book: we need to bring back throwing dirt at despots. The nation is crying out for some redress and I think letting the people pelt some cow shit and a few rotten tomatoes at their horrible landlord faces would offer some much-needed catharsis. Please ❤️