The forgotten fat cats

Britain’s royal family is the costliest monarchy in Europe by more than £100m – but it is seldom criticised for its excess

Recessions provoke criticism absent during the good times. Almost everyone tends to be more forgiving in a boom. Gordon Gecko’s “greed is good” 1980s philosophy was recycled by New Labour’s Peter Mandelson in 1997, announcing that the party was “intensely relaxed about people getting very rich” – the early 1990s recession had been forgotten.

Now, as we enter what may be merely the early stages of a more serious downturn, criticism may return with a vengeance.

Discontent is rising over Britain’s “boardroom bonanza” as executive pay soars while employees are expected to show restraint. Even a senior EU official labelled such high pay “a scourge” and in Germany, legislation now penalises companies with excessive pay differentials.

As inequality increases, some top UK executives now earn £10m-25m a year, but shareholders can check such excess if they wish, and there are signs of this happening. MPs have been criticised for profiting at public expense, financing and equipping second homes with taxpayers’ money, and the system now faces reform. However, this pales in comparison with senior business figures, and MPs’ pay falls well short of that of senior local authority executives and civil servants.

But haven’t we forgotten another tiny minority? A small group employed and subsidised at public expense, which owes its privileged public positions only to their birth; the Windsor family. In particular, the Queen and the Prince of Wales, who enjoy financial returns – official state incomes and accompanying benefits – that positively dwarf even those of the most expense-hungry MP.

Yet, curiously, we seem to overlook this privileged elite, often misunderstanding that their riches derive from the public purse. Elsewhere, it is a maxim that that those in public life should not benefit excessively from their positions. Yet the Queen grossed over £12.5m this year (£11.6m last year) from the Duchy of Lancaster. Few will have noticed the financial report published quietly on the Duchy’s site.

In June this year the Prince of Walesreceived over £16m from the Duchy of Cornwall, up £1m from 2007. These returns and other related perks have already generated parliamentary criticism.

Official expenses are met, and their wealth, helped by past tax exemptions, puts the majority of top corporate earners to shame. Many still believe such wealth is somehow necessary for the “honour” and “dignity” of their role.

It isn’t. Take £100m off their annual cost to the taxpayer and we’d still have the costliest monarchy in Europe. Ruritanian language used in connection with the royal family complicates and confuses. Official incomes for the monarch and the heir to the throne – the latter a position with no constitutionally defined role – derive from the Duchies, yet most people would be forgiven for not realising that these giant estates are in reality public properties. The income may be “private”, but that’s all, they are not personal fiefdoms.

As repossessions rise, banks quake and inflation bites, a sense of unfairness arises as it did in the early 1990s. MPs are forced to trim their privileges to retain public support. What of the Windsors? How much longer before their own fat-cat lifestyles face scrutiny?

Girls raped by Catholic priest told to stop ‘dwelling on old wounds’

A father who wants to confront the Pope about the rape of his daughters by a Catholic priest has reacted angrily to claims by a senior Australian bishop that he was dwelling crankily on old wounds.

Anthony Foster, who is flying from Britain to Sydney, is demanding that Benedict XVI and Australia’s senior Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, beg for forgiveness over the repeated rape of his daughters by the priest at a Melbourne primary school between 1988 and 1993.

Mr Foster said that his daughters had been devastated by the attacks. The elder, Emma, committed suicide this year, aged 26. Her younger sister, Katie, who became a heavy drinker, was hit by a car, aged 15, and now needs 24-hour care.

The Pope, who begins his official duties today at World Youth Day celebrations attended by an estimated 225,000 people, has promised to issue an apology this week to young people sexually abused by priests.

But when asked yesterday about an Australian Broadcasting Commission report on the Fosters’ complaints, the Church’s World Youth Day spokesman, Bishop Anthony Fisher, sounded dismissive. He said that he had not seen the report because he had been at the celebrations. “Happily, I think most of Australia was enjoying, delighting in the beauty and goodness of these young people,” he said, “rather than dwelling crankily, as a few people are doing, on old wounds.”

In an interview with an Australian website at Tokyo airport, Mr Foster rejected the comments and said that they showed “a complete lack of understanding of the victims, that there are so many people out there that really do have open wounds”. His wife, Christine, said that she was also deeply hurt: “There are no old wounds for victims. It is always current.”

The bishop’s comments forced Cardinal Pell — who was Archbishop of Melbourne at the time of the attacks — to try to repair the damage by making a public statement in which he said that he had been “very saddened” by Emma’s story.

She had endured “one of the worst things that can happen to a young woman”, he said. Cardinal Pell repeated his earlier apology to the family.

He did not say that he would meet Mr Foster, who insists that he will only accept the pontiff’s planned apology “if the Pope will embrace the notion of begging forgiveness from victims, and supporting them in every way possible and putting the resources of the Church behind that support”.

In his case Mr Foster said that it had taken eight years to win a financial settlement. He said that Cardinal Pell had introduced a system that imposed a A$50,000 (£24,000) cap on compensation. “It wasn’t just,” he said. Others had been offered as little as A$2,000. Emma and Katie’s attacker, Father Kevin O’Donnell, was convicted in 1996 of the abuse of 11 boys and a girl, aged 8 to 14, between 1946 and 1977.