There are some news headlines that are irresistible and that one simply has to follow up on. I do not as a rule track the activities of the parasitic British royal family but when I saw the BBC news headline Police ‘told to leave Queen’s nuts alone’, I had to read more.
It was interesting if not quite what I expected. It turns out that during the trial of former executives at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World who are accused of hacking into telephones and bribing the police, some interesting emails have surfaced. It turns out that the Queen likes to have bowls of snacks left out for her and gets annoyed when other people eat them.
In the email to former NoW editor Andy Coulson, which Mr Goodman also had sent to himself, he wrote: “Problem is that police on patrol eat the lot… memo now gone around to all palace cops telling them to keep their sticky fingers out.”
The email continued: “Queen furious about police stealing bowls of nuts and nibbles left out for her in apartments in the BP/Queen’s corridor. She has a very savoury tooth and staff leave out cashews, Bombay Mix, almonds etc. Prob is that police on patrol eat the lot.”
How did the Queen find out about this dastardly crime? By doing a little sleuthing of her own. She marked the levels of the nuts in the bowls to see if they dipped.
What does this tell us? Mainly that the Queen is a cheap and ungrateful person. Not only does she live a life of parasitic luxury at the taxpayer’s expense, she resents the police who are assigned to protect her, likely bored out of their minds at what must be one of the dullest jobs in British law enforcement, eating her snacks.
How dare you! She’s a very expensive and ungrateful person!
If I recall correctly from the late 90s eating the Queen Mother’s snacks was considered one of the most horrible jobs for British law enforcement, but isn’t it Philip’s job to eat the Queen’s?
Man, I bet this makes those nuts all the more irresistible!
LOL!
The guards should be spitting on the Queen’s snacks.
Turns out, no. First of all the Queen is a taxpayer. Secondly, the family’s income is a modest percentage of the income of the land they own (and have owned for centuries.) The bulk of the income of all that land goes straight into the treasury, a deal going back to King George the Third. All in all the UK turns a very substantial profit from the royal family.
(I still think they’re a horrible anachronism and should be gone soonest.)
I’d argue that most of the revenue is generated by the historical existence of the Royal family, not anything they currently do or even their continued existence. Yes they pay (some) income tax, but there are plenty of other taxes every other person in the UK is subject to that many of them are not, inheritance tax being the big one.
OK, the land and other wealth which is effectively state-owned through the Crown Estates needn’t be subject to inheritance tax, but why should this one family’s private wealth be exempt and we pay them just shy of £8 million a year?
85% (iirc) of all proceeds from those properties go to the treasury and have done so for the past couple hundred years, but you object that instead they should be paying a maximum of 40% of the value whenever a monarch happens to die?
And what you call “paying them” is, in fact, them retaining a percentage of the income of their own lands.
Please, let’s object to royalty on the many clear and valid grounds for objection that we have.
As an anti-royalist from day one (grew up in a working class immigrant family in the north of England), I’m amazed at the vitriol aimed at them. I can only guess it’s because of their visibility. In terms of parasitism, cost to the public purse, sense of entitlement, general damage to the body politic, they pale in comparison to the Masters of the Universe, CEOs, or the ruling class in the USA. Douchebags they may be, but Andrew and Harry obviously felt an obligation (misguided as it might have been), that Dubya and his kind never will.
Yes, they should go. But I’ve never been able to summon, for them, the contempt I feel for the truly horrible people who actually rule us now.
I’m with the Queen. If I needed police protection for some reason, I’d be happy to put out snacks for the police, but if they just raided my cupboard without asking, that would be really rude.
Exactly! The police can either ask permission, or get their own damn snacks! (Especially if it’s cashews, those things are YUM.)
Those other cases to which you refer are also (generally) the product of nepotism, but the Royal Family is an outlier, since said nepotism derives purely from lineage and is codified into law.
(That said, one has to admire the current Queen — much as I dislike the institution, she personally has earned my respect. Unlike Chuck.)
Where’s the surprise? This is just the latest instance, of such behaviour, not an isolated case.
During the “diamond jubilee”, the poor were forced to work for free and sleep under bridges without access to toilets or water.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/04/jubilee-pageant-unemployed
Lizardbreath wanted money diverted from heating the homes of the poor and that money used to heat a tourist attraction.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/queen-tried-to-use-state-poverty-fund-to-heat-buckingham-palace-2088179.html
Callousness and self-serving hypocrisy come with the territory of royalty and religious leaders.
Surely she doesn’t eat all the nuts? They must be replaced perioidically. Maybe they can package the leftovers — call it The Queen’s Nuts or something — and sell it to tourists for a pretty penny!
My wife’s mother used to mark the liquor bottles. Wife used to take what she wanted, then moved the mark down. How hard is that, bobbies?
… bowls of nuts and nibbles left out for her in apartments in the BP/Queen’s corridor.
In defense of Ms Windsor, she certainly lives in a world she never made.
It speaks poorly of Buckingham Palace (I’ll never look at a BP sign the same now…) security that they can’t control their perimeter well enough to forgo having guards throughout the interior, but no doubt modern paparazzi could teach the ninjas some tricks about advanced theory & practice of sneakiness.
Since her Britannic Majesty lives a life of near Guantanamo non-privacy anyhow, perhaps she could assign one of her numerous flunkies to carry around a
cantin of munchies, to be placed under her hand when she extends it in a particular way (much as her esteemed predecessor Vickie used to be followed closely by a servant carrying a chair, so that V could sit down the moment she felt like it without having to seek out less conveniently placed furniture).Or she could spring for another set of snacks, to be set out in blue bowls for the Palace Peelers, and amuse herself by trying to nick a nut without them catching her caper.
I still have a picture in my head of Elizabeth and Phillip standing about 10 feet apart trying to toss peanuts into each other’s mouths.