Outside the walls of Windsor Castle the glow of this week’s meticulously planned state visit – the first by a German president for 27 years – remains tangibly warm.
Pictures of the Princess of Wales out-dazzling the glamorous beauty of one of Germany‘s most eye-catching exports, the supermodel Claudia Schiffer, amid the splendour of the official banquet, was one of the more memorable highlights.
How courtiers must wish such reassuring images always prevailed.
But a short walk from those same castle walls the mood is chillingly different. Inside the grounds of Windsor Great Park where several senior members of the Royal Family have their homes, there is growing discomfort that the arrangements for their velvet-lined lives are about to come under intense scrutiny.
The reason, of course, stems from the public outrage at the disgraced Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor paying only a peppercorn rent to live in 30-room Royal Lodge.
Aides had hoped that the summary action of the King in forcing his brother to quit the lavish property, as well as stripping him of his princely honorific and other titles, would cauterise what was fast becoming a royal crisis.
Instead, the Andrew problem is now being perceived as the extreme manifestation of a wider culture of excess and questionable royal entitlement.
And it is why the Labour-dominated House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is poised to investigate the terms under which other royals occupy properties owned by the Crown Estate, an official body that has a duty to maximise the value of its £15billion land and property portfolio for the public purse.
The King (pictured) surrenders revenue from the estate to the Treasury each year for the benefit of the nation’s finances
Edward and Sophie, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, have a 50-year lease on Bagshot Park in Surrey (pictured) which costs them only £5,000 a year
Princess Alexandra moved into Thatched House Lodge in Richmond after her marriage in 1963. She pays £2,700 a year
The King surrenders revenue from the estate to the Treasury each year for the benefit of the nation’s finances.
In exchange, he receives the Sovereign Grant, the money which funds the monarchy, from the running costs of the Royal Household – including travel, receptions and garden parties – to the upkeep of the occupied royal palaces.
Such renewed parliamentary glare has brought back memories of a previous generation of snooping MPs who two decades ago turned up at Kensington Palace to examine how public money was being spent, hoping to poke around the apartment of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. They were refused admission.
No wonder republican noses have been twitching all this week with eager anticipation: they can smell fresh blood.
Those in this latest firing line include the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, who live in a sprawling mansion so vast it makes Royal Lodge look positively modest, and Princess Alexandra, the late Queen Elizabeth’s elderly and frail cousin, who has been paying just £2,700 a year to rent her grade-II listed property, Thatched House Lodge.
Even Prince William and Kate’s deal on their new family ‘forever home’, Forest Lodge, is in the committee’s in-tray.
But top of the pile are Prince Edward and Sophie, after Crown Estate figures revealed they pay a paltry sum for 120-room Bagshot Park, where they have lived since before their 1999 wedding.
They took out a 50-year lease on the Surrey estate for an annual £5,000 and paid a ‘market value’ rent until 2007 when (like Andrew) they were given a peppercorn rent.
The couple, who have two children, Lady Louise, 22, and James, Earl of Wessex, 17, are working royals who represent the King on duties here and abroad.
When Charles (pictured) became King three years ago, there was speculation about whether he would crack down on his relatives living in grand addresses for free or just paying modest or peppercorn rent
Crown Estate figures revealed that Prince Edward and Sophie (pictured) pay a paltry sum for 120-room Bagshot Park, where they have lived since before their 1999 wedding
Removing the dukedom Andrew received on his wedding day was understandable, some argue, but depriving him of his birthright and the title he has on his passport, is another matter, writes Richard Kay
All the same, questions are also being asked about why they need such a huge property, built for Queen Victoria’s son the Duke of Connaught, set in 51 acres and which for many decades housed the Royal Army Chaplains Department. (It famously placed a notice by the pond which read, ‘Please do not walk on the water.’)
But the real issue is why these questions are now being raised. Many believe the answer lies in the decision to strip Andrew of his title of prince.
Removing the dukedom of York he received on his wedding day was understandable, they argue, but depriving him of his birthright and the title he has on his passport, is another matter.
Some figures close to the Royal Family believe it has undermined the principal of hereditary monarchy.
As one former adviser to King Charles told me: ‘Seeing what the King can do with a swish of his famously ill-functioning pen has emboldened critics who would like to shake up the whole royal system. They sense vulnerability.’
Others say he had little choice. The clamour over Andrew and his links to the American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unceasing and his possession of titles and honours was bound up in his occupancy of a royal home that reeked of extravagance.
Nonetheless there is a feeling in royal circles that a move designed to appease public opinion, may yet turn out to be an own goal.
As ever, it is public perception that counts. Recent polling among the over 65s shows support for the monarchy remains rock solid at 81 per cent, but it slides among the younger generation.
In those in the key 18 to 24 bracket, support for the royals is only 41 per cent and is dropping every year.
It is hardly helpful, therefore, against this background with the royals seemingly under siege, that along comes a BBC documentary with a distinctly hostile and anti-monarchy tinge.
Some figures close to the Royal Family believe Charles’ (right) decision to strip Andrew (left) of his royal titles has undermined the principal of hereditary monarchy
Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, the former home of Andrew and his ex wife Sarah – who paid only peppercorn rent
That this scathing appraisal is presented by David Dimbleby, who enjoyed a long and lucrative career commentating on the Royal Family and who now in the autumn of his broadcasting career has decided to put the boot in, has only added to royal dismay.
As TV critic Christopher Stevens noted in his Daily Mail review, archive footage served to remind us that it was Dimbleby rather than the Archbishop of Canterbury who presided at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.
While flaunting his own television heritage, Dimbleby complains about the Royal Family’s antiquated privileges, its bowing and scraping, ‘vast wealth’ and what he labels as the King’s hypocrisy in privately expressing strong views while maintaining public neutrality.
Little wonder that The Guardian newspaper, with its long-held republican conviction, has given the three-part series a four-star review.
The timing of such a broadcast, with its provocative title What’s The Monarchy For?, while curious is surely no more than a coincidence, but it certainly begs the question whether the BBC would have dared broadcast it when Queen Elizabeth was alive.
It is also convenient for both the BBC, which has been in the eye of its own self-made storm over the Panorama fiasco and for Downing Street, amid anger over the Budget, that the Andrew debacle continues to divert so much public and media attention.
For the royals, however, the Royal Lodge saga is much more discombobulating. For it has highlighted just how many properties are at the family’s disposal across the country.
When Charles became King three years ago, there was speculation about whether he would crack down on his relatives living in grand addresses for free or just paying modest or peppercorn rent.
At the very least it was thought some of the extensive portfolio might be mothballed.
That has not happened. Instead, the scandal over Andrew has triggered a full-scale housing crisis for the royals.
There is distress among the King’s friends that the 88-year-old Princess Alexandra, who is in poor health, is potentially among those whose living arrangements are being questioned (pictured in 2022)
The Princess has been living in a flat at St James’s Palace, which has access to a shared lawn with Clarence House, where the King (left) and Queen Camilla (right) live
For some, there are bound to be awkward questions about whether they are effectively being subsidised because their rents are artificially low.
But there is distress among the King’s friends that the 88-year-old Princess Alexandra, who is in poor health, is potentially among those whose living arrangements are being questioned.
Charles is close to the widowed Alexandra, who is 58th in line to the throne, but who has been a working member of the Royal Family for most of her adult life.
Questions are being asked about why she is paying so little rent for Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park, south-west London, where she moved after her wedding to businessman Sir Angus Ogilvy in 1963.
In fact, I understand she has barely visited the property in the past two years and because of ill health has been living in a flat at St James’s Palace. The apartment gives her access to a shared lawn with Clarence House, where the King and Queen Camilla live.
Charles often visits Alexandra, to whom he is devoted. He is also godfather to her daughter Marina, whose own home in Windsor Great Park is also likely to be scrutinised by the PAC.
For years Alexandra was one of the hardest working of the minor royals, who also include her brother the Duke of Kent, on duty this week accompanying German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier when he laid a wreath in the ruins of the original Coventry Cathedral destroyed by the Nazis.
But in recent times she has had a much lower public profile. And because of that her living arrangements have prompted questions from MPs who have little memory of the stylish Alexandra, and also because her rent arrangement for Thatched House Lodge is complicated.
It involves two leases, one signed in 1971 and the other in 1995. For the first part she paid £3,000 and a fixed £700-a-year and for the second she paid a £670,000 premium and rent on a rising scale, which taken together suggests an annual rent of £2,700, or about £225 a month.
Regardless of her loyal service to the Crown, the disclosures about Alexandra’s situation raise concerns about whether the premium and rent reflect the maximum that could have been obtained for the lease, despite of the substantial amount paid up front.
All these inconvenient details might not have been aired were it not for the Andrew episode, which has smothered so much of the family’s other duties for the past six years.
At its heart has been the relationship between two royal men – the King and his brother. It is a complex story of brotherly harmony punctuated by ill-feeling, envy and open hostility.
For 22 years Andrew was the ‘spare’ to Charles the heir. But when William was born in 1982, Andrew’s star inevitably began to wane. He was also jealous of his brother’s wealth courtesy of the Duchy of Cornwall – there were no such riches for the second son.
Charles resented the affection that Andrew was perceived to have as his mother’s favourite.
Royal Lodge, which she had given to him on the death of the Queen Mother, came to symbolise everything that repelled a public shocked by the allegations that have swirled around him.
Staying put in the house his mother had given him became central to Andrew’s very being.
He also believed relinquishing it would be an admission of wrongdoing and Andrew has always denied the claims by Virginia Giuffre that she was trafficked to have sex with him on three occasions. Belief, in the end, was not enough.
The danger for the monarchy now is that in allowing the situation to rumble on for so long and then acting – albeit decisively – as he did, the King has opened a Pandora’s box that will have Left-wing MPs licking their lips as they pore over royal affairs.
