'Buckingham Palace pretends royals are prudent with our money – it's utter hogwash'

Another year, another multimillion-pound splurge on one of the richest families in the country.

Buckingham Palace pretends the royals are being prudent with public money. What utter hogwash. They even have the cheek to suggest that Charles is being generous because he only takes 12% of the income of the Crown Estate.

Reality check: the Crown Estate has in effect been a public body since 1760, and until 2011, 100% of its profits went to the Treasury to pay for schools, hospitals, defence and, yes, disability benefits. This 12% is a new royal tax on the public purse.

The Sovereign Grant is £86.3million a year, up from £7.9m in 2011, the last year of the Civil List, but add on the unique tax exemptions, the profits from the Duchies that should be going to the taxpayer, and the cost of security including to “protect” minor royals the public has barely heard of, and the real cost is now upwards of £500m a year.

READ MORE: King Charles axes beloved Royal Train as Royal Family's cost to taxpayer revealed

Every other European monarchy costs less that £50m. The annual figure does not include expensive one-offs like the coronation. No other European monarchy bothers with coronations any more. The last was Norway in 1906.

The shocking truth is that the royals really don’t care how much public money they spend. Last year they incredibly ran up a bill for the taxpayer of almost £1.2m on charter flights just within Great Britain to places as difficult to reach as Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle.

What’s wrong with the train, or even normal scheduled flights? They also racked up £475,000 on helicopters.

And don’t keep lecturing us about climate change, please, when you are in the top 1% of the world’s emitters.

The royals love to call the Duchies “private estates” but they are not owned by the royals but held in trust for the nation. They are simply royal slush funds.

And the priority is to make as much money for the royals as possible. They charge the NHS over £1m to park ambulances in a derelict warehouse in London. They charge the army to yomp over Dartmoor as they rehearse to fight for king and country. They charge the cash-strapped Ministry of Justice millions in rent for the now empty Dartmoor prison.

Meanwhile, William helps himself to close on £20m last year from the Duchy of Cornwall, a personal income over a hundred times that of the Prime Minister. His father is estimated to have a private wealth of some £2billion.

Charles has put out the spin that he wants a slimmed down monarchy, but he clearly doesn’t want a slimmed down bill for the taxpayer. The bulging royal coffers are overflowing.

The one bit of good news is that the ridiculously expensive royal train is to be retired.

But unless Charles is prepared to cut the taxpayer bill drastically, there will be plenty calling for him and his family to follow the train into the sidings.