King Charles - disquiet at Highgrove & the gardeners’ exodus - SUNDAY TIMES INVESTIGATION

[vera99]

Murdoch is growing bolder in his dotage — first with Trump, and now with another bombshell investigation into the grasping, stagnant, and catastrophically out-of-touch Windsors. And yet we keep pumping more public money into this so-called dysfunctional family.

What you need to know

King’s demands, staff shortages and low pay led to gardener exodus at Highgrove

Royal charity which runs gardens told to offer mental health support after formal investigation

Charles has lost 11 of 12 garden staff since 2022 including two head gardeners who quit within a year

Monarch said of one worker: “Do not put that man in front of me again”

After Ukraine invasion King proposed plugging staff shortages with war refugees or the elderly

At one point half of staff were on minimum wage

https://archive.ph/fspT3#selection-1495.0-1501.155

🤣🤣 oh I laughed when that little titbit did the rounds on here several years ago!!!
I mean honestly! Charles ! A fully plumbed in ceramic sink !
pulled off the wall with his bare hands! 🤣🤣
if it was remotely true or possible, instead of criticism I would actually be very impressed!

It’s not remotely comparable through, your gardner is self employed and the gardeners at Highgrove are employed, the Highgrove staff won’t have to pay for insurance, cost of their van, equipment, travel time, fuel, VAT etc. I could go on, all of that and more has to come out of that £18 per hour, the employees at Highgrove will have holiday and sick pay, pension contributions, all equipment and vehicles provided, they just rock up to work do their job and go home, you are comparing apples and oranges.

The Past Is Myself is a fabulous account, I have a copy and re-read it regularly,

As for public sector salaries (which a job in the Royal Household is), they are and always have been chronically out of step with broader market salaries. Having worked in a public sector body offering fabulous work and experience, recruitment was tricky as pretty much everyone had to take a big pay cut to take a role there.

To take a sector I know well, a mid-level lawyer (3-6 years’ experience) working for the Treasury Solicitor or Government Legal Department will be paid £50-£74k. In London, the average salary for a newly qualified solicitor is £65-85k. So to take a role there as a solicitor with several years’ experience, you will have to effectively drop back to the level you were at before you even qualified. If you work at a big firm, that could be a salary cut of as much as 50%. The work life balance and quality of the work will be drawcard for some, but as against the rest of the market, their skills are massively undervalued.

Now with our digital footprints, everything’s out there for any future authoritarian state to see and act upon. God save the King! And I’m right there with him when it comes to hunting down ragwort I would lose my rag over it - if I knew what it was.It is a beautiful plant I’ve seen whole fields of it, but I never knew what it was until now !

First they came for the knotweed, but I wasn’t Japanese, so I looked away.
Then they came for the convolvulus, but I told myself it wasn’t binding.
Then they came for the misnamed delphiniums, but my dicKtiUnary was useless.
Then they came for the ragwort, but I had no horse, so I stayed silent.
And then they came for me, with evidence planted by grasses — and that was the last thing I saw BEFORE THE COMPOST REIGNED DOWN AND blotted out the light.

I would LOVE to see the re -enactment of that on The Crown!! It would be worth the Netflix subscription for that alone! 🤣🤣🤣

Here it is from a royal servant - it is seemingly too incredible to be made up I believe it.

Prince Charles ‘ripped sink from wall’ in frustration says expert

The Prince of Wales reportedly has a “legendary temper” that he can sometimes take out on staff, or indeed the plumbing. His former butler Ken Stronach sold several stories to the press in 1995 about what it was really like working for Charles. Clive Goodman, royal correspondent for News of the World, recalled one of these stories on the documentary ‘Royal Servants’, uploaded to YouTube in 2011.

Diana a beacon of light? Only if you wanted to fail at school, remain uneducated, marry rich, have affairs and make a public spectacle of yourself.

Mocking aside if it could be proven to your satisfaction, with solid evidence, would it change the way you view him? Just as a hypothetical, for the sake of argument.

But the oft- repeated tale of Charles having his valet squeeze his toothpaste is unfair because at the time he’d injured,maybe even broken, his arm.

Now when I had trigger thumb for a year I had to ask my husband to squeeze my toothpaste too, so I think we can let Charles off that particular charge!😲

I have no idea whether that anecdote is true or not- but my admittedly very posh but completely non royal DS pulled a sink off the wall by swinging on it at the age of 7……

Sorry but your sons anecdote isn’t hilarious, Charles on the other hand 😂🤣

I absolutely hate to say it, but my God, the Nazis were clever in infiltrating every ‘normal’ area of society: youth clubs, mothers’ and women’s groups, church and professional organisations etc so that you just couldn’t get away with remaining neutral. Children were encouraged to tell on their teachers if they didn’t give the Nazi salute and you had to actively show your support in order to stay in your job or profession.

You've just described every left wing, authoritarian, modern day social justice cause. Most notably the trans rights movement.

She was the "People's Princess" I shed a single tear for QE2 when I heard Andrew Marr teared up on LBC whearas I shed a river of tears for her and couldn't fathom how we as a country would get through her funeral. Thouigh we did - flag down and all - can you hear the people cry ?

I would still find it hilarious! It’s just too funny! If it’s true and I was the staff member I wouldn’t be able to contain myself.

Damn if true I shall had to change my script. That said facts don't matter I hadn't heard the rebuttal but most people just remember the story. Still think running the bath with a thermometer rings true though.

She might have been your princess. I thought she was a PITA. It was sad that she died, but the hysteria was ridiculous, particularly for those of us living and working in London who actually needed to get some work done.

I also looked at the Times article perhaps through a slightly more questioning lens than other posters! It’s certainly very carefully written.

The guts of it - there was one grievance raised against not Charles himself but the “Garden’s management” which we are then told is The Kings Foundation charity. They, properly, as we are told, commissioned an indendent review, which found a number of issues. The Kings’ Foundation response to the journalist was to say that: “staff had been given pay increases and the proposals contained in the grievance report had been mostly implemented. The source added that there were no longer any vacancies within the gardening team, and only injuries that could occur “within any working garden” had been reported”. The journalist does not suggest that this statement is inaccurate, or that the changes have not been made.

So far, so good - a complaint has been appropriately investigated and apparently acted upon. That’s a fairly normal occurrence in any workplace - hardly worthy of a splash.

Then we get to the spin against Charles himself. His memos outlining what he wants done by the gardening team are “strikingly specific”, we are told - “demanding, for instance, that staff move a single, unacceptable ragwort from the perimeter of his swimming pool”. It’s worth remembering that “demanding” here was the journalist’s own choice of words. I think it’s incredibly unlikely the instructions said “I demand the ragwort be removed” (if they did, it would have been quote, for starters!). More likely “remove ragwort from swimming pool perimeter” was an item on his list. That’s hardy noteworthy, and actually far more helpful to the gardening team than non-specific instructions.

Then it says Charles tells them how he has felt, positive and negative, about their work. He gave them feedback, in other words. Again, hardly worthy of a splash.

Then we get to the the allegation that “Of 12 full-time gardeners employed in 2022, 11 have left, including two heads of gardens and a deputy head gardener who departed within the space of a year. One had served the King for decades” . it does not mention that one of those Heads of Garden was Debs Goodenough, who was well known as a Head Gardener and recently retired after 10 years at Highgrove. Presumably the other who had worked there “for decades” also retired?

You can go through the entire article looking at how carefully it has been written. Long on insinuations, but short on what Charles is actually, objectively, alleged to have done wrong. It reads to me like the editor wanted an anti-Charles story, and the journalist did what he could with the not exactly damning things he found out.

Indeed - and it’s very scary! I hate the polarisation of politics, the craziness of identity politics and the way some people seek ever more ways to divide us from each other.

in our increasingly diverse society we are in desperate need of things which bring us together. Religion can’t do this any more. Personally I think the monarchy has the potential to do so, but yes, it needs to change and adapt.

One of the reasons I get frustrated with all the anti-monarchy stuff is that it could represent a chance for a unifying force in society , IF DONE RIGHT. What else can provide a unifying force to bring us all together? I don’t know - and it’s very worrying. It’s one thing to celebrate diversity, but quite another to set sections of society against each other which is how things seem to be going.

Ragwort is only poisonous when mixed with hay. Horses tend to avoid it 'in the wild' so a rogue ragwort in tended gardens is no risk to man nor beast. this much maligned plant, as the ill informed post above incorrectly asserts is in fact incredible. Ragwort is an important native plant that helps feed dozens of bees, moths, other insects and birds. Something One would hope Charles would support.

The republicans can never put forward a positive picture of their republic, let alone what it will cost and how the citizens will feel a material difference. All it ever seems to be is some pig in men's clothing wearing a crown.

After what happened to Princess Margaret I don’t blame him!

OK, fine let’s say I agree with you. But if the claims are really so flimsy and so damaging, why isn’t the Buckingham Palace PR machine coming out all guns blazing with a righteous rebuttal? They’re no slouches, and they’re certainly not short of talent. The fact that we haven't seen a full-throated denial suggests they may not feel on solid ground. By holding back instead of doubling down or pushing back it raises the possibility they’re worried about what else might yet emerge, or worse, that there’s truth to the original allegations.

You may be familiar with the phrase, "Never complain, never explain."

It may well do.

I think to myself though - what would I do if my job was to draw a bath for someone? Obviously, I would want to know how deep and how hot they wanted it. If the person can give me specific instructions of what they actually want, then there is no guess work involved, and my job is much easier.

(The same applies to any delegated task, by the way. Good delegation means the delegatee knows exactly what they ae expected to deliver…)

But the RF very rarely respond to criticism in the press. I’d say there’s nothing unusual about their silence.

They probably know it’s a very biased and agenda-driven article and are just rolling their eyes!