The Duke of York wants his daughters to be full time Royals?

[MidnightVelvetthe7th]

www.express.co.uk/news/royal/724136/prince-andrew-requests-princesses-beatrice-eugenie-kensington-prince-charles-queen-william

This is a Sunday Express link, not a Fail one.

So Andrew wants both of his daughters to have full time royal roles funded by the public & have larger apartments at Kensington Palace. Given that the only time I ever see them in the news is for dreadful outfits & holidays, to me they are embarrassing & a bit cringy.

Andrew is complaining that they are overshadowed by William, Catherine & Harry. But if you believe & support a system of privilege by birth such as the monarchy, then it stands to reason that the direct heirs are more important than the rest.

Does Andrew have a point & IABU?!

Nah prince Frederick of Denmark is the hottest of them all!

"Wind, if the stories are true then it's a shame Prince Charles didn't show the backbone of Harald when under pressure not to marry camilla in the 70s."

I agree with that.

Perhaps Camilla really didn't want to wait to marry- or maybe she didn't want to marry him.

raised it's true. It's in my book "The Queen at Home" which is a real eye opener!

I suspect Camilla worried Charles was a milktoast in thrall to his father. Doesn't matter when it's your secret shag, terrible defect in a husband.

And saying he was forced by Philip into going ahead with marrying Diana! THE MAN WAS 31, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE! Pathetic.

150 personal servants?? That is ridiculous! He probably think that's streamlining the Royal Family! I doubt the Queen and Phil have less! I'm not sure my blood pressure would take that book vanilla although I wouldn't mind reading the Sue Townsend book. Do you think we'll ever become a republic? My DB has no time at all for the RF but when I told him my prediction that George won't be king, he said that the will was just not there to get rid of them, so they will just trundle on as an anachronism until one of them decides enough is enough and declares a republic ( never)

My DH I mean. I've never asked my DB...

I honestly think 150 servants is not true. I think he has 17 personal servants at most and TBH they are gardeners, estate workers and grooms and not someone squeezing his toothpaste (which incidentally happened when he had his arm in a sling).

I have a lot of time for what he started - The Princes Trust - now celebratings its 40th birthday. They work with 60,000 disadvantaged young people a year and 80% of them go on to full time employment. I know someone whose life was turned round by the Trust (don't want to out myself here... she was sponsored by them back in the late seventies and the chance that she was given meant that she worked her way up slowly but surely and ended up on the Board of a major company - all from that chance given to her all those years ago)

Everyone was very negative about what he was doing back then but what has evolved is an enduring charity that does a lot of good. Compare that to Camila Batmanjelly and the Kids Company....

Sorry... but sometimes I think we miss the good things that some Royals do.

I do think as people many of them do do good things. The Queen is our most experienced public servant. The Duke of Edinburgh set up the DoE award and for the WWF and Princess Anne with Save the Children from memory, but they really have to do these things in order to justify their existence and because really they can't do anything else. As an institution, I think it will become more and more unjustifiable, especially if the younger Royals don't step up to the plate.

Its very easy to do good things though, when you've got huge wealth, privilege and absolute "job" security. If I was Prince Charles I'd certainly be doing equally good works. Whether he does it all because he genuinely cares about people or whether it's to justify his lavish existence or whether it's to give some structure and meaning to his days we don't know. But he's hardly going to just sit in his apartments all day is he.

He has many many more than 17 personal servants. He even has them ironing his shoe laces, he sometimes has 5 changes of clothes a day which his servants have to pick up off the floor where he just drops them. It's unbelievable what he has his servants do, totally demeaning and unnecessary work. It's pathetic tbh.

Hoops I never noticed that before but you're right - Haakon and William do look alike. They're distant cousins so I guess it's not that surprising. God knows my own father has third and fourth cousins who look more like him than his siblings do!

Brian Honey's book "At Home With The Queen":

"Charles has a large staff of 80....the Queen Mother had 83.......there are some 368 men and women working full time in the royal household today..."

Everyone was very negative about what he was doing back then but what has evolved is an enduring charity that does a lot of good. Compare that to Camila Batmanjelly and the Kids Company...*

And who was one of the biggest supporters of her woo-woo therapy ? Why it was fellow new age wacko Prince Charles.

www.standard.co.uk/news/prince-charless-day-on-the-other-side-of-the-tracks-6717082.html

Queen Yes, Edward Vii, Kaiser Bill and Tsar Nicholas looked like triplets! Not that it did two of them any good...

raised - I think Prince Charles had someone put toothpaste on his toothbrush when he had a broken arm. I believe that otherwise he manages himself.

We'll never really know what happens behind closed doors. The servants employed by Buck House are likely to be massive royalists, prepared to work on the whole for minimum wage doing nonsense like dressing grown men and ironing shoelaces. They are unlikely to reveal that their job is that demeaning and unnecessary. there are official papers that will never be revealed.
I'd like to think that if we have to have a King, he is someone who doesn't have to have 85 servants to deal with his every whim when he, as others have said, has to face people who are where they are through their own merits and achievements. I would be feeling thoroughly embarrassed.

Some of the 85 staff work in his office answering letters.and making travel arrangements. They don't all stand behind him with an organic air freshener in case he farts.

No idea where you got that from savedbythebell - someone ironing his shoelaces, that sounds like DM fodder. I read on Wiki about the 17 personal staff. Of course there are far more aiding him in his role but the original post was about personal servants. From what I know.. he does not have someone wiping his arse..!

As far as the Princes Trust - well... he started it off with the severance pay he got from the Navy. He had the idea and it does a hell of a lot of good and I think it deserves praise. As do a lot of those he helped. It was his baby. I remember the press back then dismissing his idea.

Of course they all have wealth and privilege beyond anyone's imagination but there are very many hugely wealthy people out there who have private jets, fast cars, yachts and live the playboy lifestyle. At least Charles has done some good and he certainly does not embrace a spenthrift lifestyle.

The thing is... if you are anti royalist there is nothing right that they can do.

Prince Philip did a lot to modernise the Royal Family back in the day. One of his modernisations was to introduce a telephone system in Buckingham Palace so that the Royal family could phone each other. Prior to that if they wanted to send each other a message, they wrote a note and a footman took it to the recipient on a silver plate. This was in the 1950s!!!

There are other changes about which we might think "about bloody time, that needed doing about 50 years ago" (eg the Queen paying tax) that just aren't done because of tradition, "we've always done it like this, why change," no one being willing to challenge the monarch etc. It takes a long time to make changes in the Royal Family.

It's interesting how little the Queen herself gets criticised on threads like these. eg I'd like to think that if we have to have a King, he is someone who doesn't have to have 85 servants yet the Queen almost certainly has that many or more. And as I have mentioned - the tax thing, she didn't pay tax for 40 years of her reign, you'd think it might have occurred to her that it might be seen as a good thing to do before it was "suggested" to her in the 1990s. But no, yet when she did "agree" to it, she was lauded for her public-spiritedness.

Charles is all for streamlining the royal family and casting off the randoms. Just for that I like him!

We are too scared to criticise Queenie, we might end up in the tower

The thing is... if you are anti royalist there is nothing right that they can do.

Well yes, but that is because it's the concept of choosing the head of state by virtue of birth that is flawed, not necessarily the people themselves.

However, the whole republic thing doesn't seem to be going too well for America at the moment. Maybe there could be an opening for Beatrice And Eugenie there?

there are some 368 men and women working full time in the royal household today.

The queen has something like 14 dogs.

I suspect at least 3 people are just in the grounds poop scooping.

Yes Balloonslayer Apparently the Netflix series is going to show Phil in a whole new light as a moderniser or the RF.

The thing with America being a republic is that neither Trump or Clinton are going to be President in 8 years time. The betting is they will be one term Presidents. If we happen to, by accident of birth end up with a dangerous buffoon as Head of State, that's it until they die. Granted Parliament is the ultimate Law making body and can overrule the Monarch if they go too far, but the Senate can do the same to the President. Yet everyone is still terrified of Trump becoming President.

We then have to hope they have somehow managed to bring up a half decent child ...

No idea where you got that from savedbythebell - someone ironing his shoelaces
Well it's how we get most of our information about the royals, I read about it. Or should we only believe the stuff that puts them in a good light. Just google it, there's a lot more than that.

course they all have wealth and privilege beyond anyone's imagination are very many hugely wealthy people out there who have private jets, fast cars, yachts and live the playboy lifestyle
Of course there are, but taxpayers aren't funding it. Why the hell should we pay one family to lives of such opulence.

Yes there are very few families that are still hugely wealthy that have been that way due to generations of inherited wealth. They have their wealth through them or their parents or grandparents making lots of money. And yes, we don't pay for them. I know much of the monarchy is funded from the Crown Estates but the Crown Estates would revert to the State if we didn't have the Monarchy, and the State would have those funds.