The Great Survivors

by Peter Conradi

  It remains to be seen whether such proposals will eventually see the light of day. Even if they do, it will not be enough for some, such as Ben Weyts, a member of the Chamber of Representatives for Vlaams Belang, a party whose ultimate aim is an independent Flemish republic; in the meantime he and his fellow party members would like to see the King paid just a salary. So how much would the monarch be paid? “The same as ‌the prime minister,” replies Weyts29 – a generous salary by Belgian standards, but a fraction of the amount that he gets at present.

  Conscious of such criticism, King Albert has been keen to show he is sharing some of the suffering of his hard-pressed subjects. In January 2012 the palace announced that he would voluntarily renounce a three-per-cent inflation-linked pay rise – roughly €350,000 – to which he was automatically entitled under the constitution, and use the money to pay some of the property-maintenance costs normally borne by the government. The King “had the intention to contribute voluntarily to the ‌[government’s] austerity measures”, it said.30

  For critics of the opaque nature of Belgian royal financing, their Dutch neighbours offer a more acceptable model. That country’s rules restrict payment to four members of the royal family: the monarch and his or her spouse and the next in line to the throne and his or her spouse. Given that Queen Beatrix is a widow, this means that just she, Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and Crown Princess Máxima qualify. Rather than receiving a single lump sum, however, each of them is given two distinct payments – the first part, which reached €7.16 million (£5.81 million) in 2011 and is effectively a salary, and the second, considerably larger part – amounting to €26.41 million (£21.95 million) – which pays for the 260 or so people who work in the Amsterdam, Noordeinde and Huis ten Bosch palaces, and other maintenance and travel costs. This spending is laid out in accounts that can be monitored – making the Dutch royal family commendably transparent, if not especially cheap. According to official figures, the total cost of maintaining the monarchy in 2011 reached €39.17 million (once another €5.61 million to cover work by the government information service and the cost of ceremonial military activities had been added) – though it was due to fall slightly in 2012. This makes it the second most expensive monarchy in Europe, after the British.

  The Scandinavian monarchies, not surprisingly, are also relatively transparent and less costly for taxpayers. King Haakon VII, first king of Norway’s current dynasty, got off to a good start in 1905 with a civil list fixed at a generous 700,000 Norwegian kroner a year – the equivalent of about £30–33 million a year today. In order to avoid unpleasant discussions every year about money, it was decided to fix the sum for the duration of his reign. No one, though, had foreseen the inflation of the 1920s, which reduced the real value of the royal couple’s income to a third of what it had been when he came to the throne.

  Fortunately for Haakon and his wife Maud, they could also benefit from the generosity of her father, Edward VII. When they married in 1896, the British King gave his daughter a generous allowance of £5,000 a year – understandable given that her husband, then Prince Carl of Denmark, was a second son with little prospect of his own throne and the wealth that would bring. Curiously, the sum was increased to £7,000 – more than half a million pounds in today’s money – and continued to be paid for the rest of her life.

  Haakon and his successors did receive steady inflation-linked increases in the post-war years; as elsewhere, however, the figures were deceptive: as the years passed, there was growing concern at what were called “camouflaged supplements” – that is, the hiding-away of expenditure on the royal family into broader government spending. Harald, the present monarch, also faced criticism of the cost of a renovation of the palace – the first major one for many years – that was begun after he succeeded his father in 1991. Decades of neglect took their toll: the final bill by the time they had finished in 2000 was 400 million Norwegian kroner (almost £43 million), far exceeding the original budget of 150 million kroner.

  A report was commissioned from Dag Trygsland Hoelseth, a Norwegian historian specializing in royal history, and in 2002 a new system was introduced: under its terms, the King in 2010 was paid nine million kroner as an apanasje (salary), intended to cover his personal expenses and official clothes, with a further 142.5 million kroner for the costs of the court, 15.7 million kroner for the renovation of palaces and 20.9 million kroner to mark his and the Queen’s seventieth birthdays, which goes to a foundation to support humanitarian activities. Crown Prince Haakon and his wife also receive their own apanasje of 7.5 million kroner, with a further 15.7 million kroner to cover their operating costs. Taken together, this takes the cost to the state budget to 232.2 million kroner (about £25.2 million).

  The Danish royal family, subject to a more transparent accounting system since 2001, appears considerably better value. As of October 2011 the total annual bill came to 97.4 million Danish kroner (just under £11 million). The Queen receives the overwhelming majority of this – 75.5 million Danish kroner – but is required to give ten per cent (7.5 million kroner) of it to her husband Henrik and 1.5 per cent (1.1 million kroner) to her sister Benedikte. The money is intended to cover costs incurred during the carrying-out of their official duties as well as the upkeep of the interior of their palaces – although the state covers external repairs. Crown Prince Frederik meanwhile receives 18.6 million kroner, 1.86 million kroner of which he must give to his wife, Crown Princess Mary. A relatively modest 3.3 million kroner goes to his younger brother, Joachim. The Prince’s former wife, Alexandra, whom he divorced in 2005, has continued to receive about 1.9 million kroner a year, although since she remarried in 2007 she has had to start paying tax on it.

  The Swedish royal family, at just over 122 million Swedish kronor (£11.4 million) in 2011, comes in at about the same cost as the Danish version. Under an agreement between the King and the government made in 1996, fifty-one per cent of this goes on Kungliga hovstaten (court administration), which covers the official duties, travel, administration and personal expenses of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia, Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel, and the King’s elderly aunt, Lilian. (The royal couple’s two other children, Carl Philip and Madeleine, are not included.) The remaining forty-nine per cent, under the heading of Slottsstaten (palace administration), finances the royal palaces, their grounds and the various royal collections – although about as much again is obtained in entrance fees and other revenues from the palaces which are open to the public.

  Cheapest of all the seven major monarchies is the Spanish one; under article sixty-five, paragraph one of the country’s constitution, the King is entitled to an annual sum from the state budget, which he is free to spend on himself and members of his family. For 2011 the sum was fixed at €8.43 million (£7.01 million) – 5.2 per cent less than the previous year, after spending on the monarchy was cut in line with the funding of other constitutional bodies such as the parliament. The sum is intended to cover the costs incurred by the monarch in carrying out his duties as head of state, but not to pay for official visits, receiving foreign delegations or security. The King is also not required to pay for the upkeep of the Zarzuela Palace or any other royal domains, which is funded by a body known as the Patrimonio Nacional (National Heritage).

  In December 2011 the palace revealed for the first time how the money was divided between members of the royal family. Of the €8.43 million, the King received €292,000 (€140,000 in the form of salary, and the remainder to cover expenses) – taxed at forty per cent, while Prince Felipe was paid €146,375 (compared with the mere €78,185 earned by the prime minister). Queen Sofía and her daughters Elena and Cristina and daughter-in-law Letizia did not receive an official salary as such, but were paid up to €375,000 between them in expenses.

  Concentrating on civil lists and apanages risks ignoring another element in the equation: the private wealth accumulated by the various royal families, which dwarfs anything they receive from the state. Not s
urprisingly, determining precisely who is worth how much has proved difficult – although this has not prevented people trying.

  During the 1970s, for example, it was widely assumed that Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was the wealthiest woman in the world – surprising perhaps given that her public image was of a rather homely lady more comfortable on a bicycle than on the back seat of a limousine. This impression was strengthened by the publication in 1979 of the biography, by William Hoffman, Queen Juliana: The Story of the Richest Woman in the World. Such estimates appear to have been exaggerated: after the death of her husband Prince Bernhard in December 2004, the Dutch royal fortune was evaluated at about €200 million – a huge sum by most people’s standards, but certainly not enough to give Juliana a place in the top ten.

  When Forbes, the American business magazine, attempted a study of the world’s richest royals in 2009, its list was headed by King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, with an estimated net worth of $35 billion. The rest of the list was dominated by oil-rich Arabs, with only two European monarchs: in sixth place was Prince Hans-Adam of Liechtenstein, whose wealth Forbes put at $6 billion, and ninth was Prince Albert II of Monaco, with an estimated $1.4 billion. Queen Elizabeth II, meanwhile, was down in twelfth place, with an estimated $650 million fortune, ahead of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, whose estimated $300 million – less than one hundredth of her ‌Thai counterpart’s – placed her fourteenth.31

  The source of Hans-Adam’s wealth is not difficult to explain: Liechtenstein’s princely family owns LGT Group, a lucrative private-banking, wealth- and asset-management concern, which is headquartered in Vaduz, the capital, and has more than two dozen branches across Europe and beyond. It also owns RiceTec, a Texas company that develops hybrid rice. Much of the Monégasque royal family’s money, meanwhile, comes from its holdings of real estate in the tiny principality.

  The sources of wealth of the heads of Europe’s larger monarchies are more complex. As discussed above, Queen Elizabeth has considerable land, property and other financial holdings. The Dutch royal family, meanwhile, has a substantial slice of Royal Dutch Shell. Despite its absence from Forbes’s analysis, the Belgian royal family has accumulated a considerable fortune over the years, with some calculations published in the late 1990s putting it at more than €1 billion. At the time, a spokesman for the Royal Palace, Françoise Gustin, described the figures as grossly exaggerated, but would not give any alternative ‌sums to prove them wrong.32

  The foundations of the royal family’s wealth were laid by Léopold I, thanks, initially at least, to his brief marriage to Princess Charlotte, heir to the British throne. The £50,000 a year he was paid by the British government after her death was a colossal sum – equivalent to more than £3 million today, and double the amount received by Prince Frederick, Duke of York, the heir presumptive to the throne, and eight times the £6,000 a year that his sister-in-law, the Dowager-Duchess of Kent, was left with to bring up the future Queen Victoria after the death of her husband. To this should be added his substantial inheritance from his wife. He was also allowed to keep Claremont House, the mansion where they had lived.

  Even after he became king of the Belgians – which earned him a generous annual sum of 2.7 million francs (or about £108,000) – Léopold insisted, extraordinarily, on continuing to receive his British pension, partly because of the doubts about the long-term viability of Belgium as a country. After some haggling, a compromise was struck: he would still receive his allowance but reimburse the British Treasury with any money left after he had covered the upkeep of Claremont House and paid off any debts accumulated while living in England.

  Not surprisingly, Léopold did not return a penny until April 1834, when the British parliament threatened him with an official investigation into the £150,000 he had received since ascending the Belgian throne. In his book, A Throne in Brussels, Paul Belien estimates Léopold received a total of £1.4 million from 1818 until his death in December 1865, a sum equivalent to more than £80 million today. “His marriage to Charlotte was by far the most expensive royal marriage the British have had to finance in ‌their entire history,” Belien concludes.33

  Determined to ensure the financial future of his dynasty, Léopold was also a keen investor, buying real estate across Europe and shares in a number of companies, including, most significantly, Société Générale de Belgique, a holding company set up by the Dutch King Willem I in 1822 to encourage investment in what had then been the southern provinces of his realm. Rather than buy the shares out of his own fortune, Léopold did so with money the company itself lent him, under an advantageous arrangement with Ferdinand de Meeûs, its corrupt governor – who was later rewarded with the hereditary title of Count de Meeûs d’Argenteuil.

  His son, Léopold II, also devoted considerable attention to boosting the family fortune; indeed the motivation behind his attempt at the end of the nineteenth century to turn the Congo into a personal colony was as much personal enrichment as a desire for national glory. Quite how much found its way to Léopold II’s descendants remains unclear, given his determination to disinherit his daughters and his establishment of the Donation Royale. More recent Belgian monarchs do not appear to have been quite such successful accumulators of wealth as the country’s first two kings.

  The Scandinavian monarchs are believed to be considerably poorer. Norway’s King Harald, for example, once claimed his inheritance was two figures in millions of Norwegian kroner – the equivalent of a maximum of about £10 million. Spain’s Juan Carlos is also not thought to have much of a personal fortune – not that he could be said to live frugally: a book published in 2009 claimed the King, renowned for his penchant for fast cars, luxury yachts and expensive ski resorts, has a fleet of seventy vehicles, including an extremely rare Rolls-Royce Phantom IV, once owned by General Franco, and a Harley Davidson given to him by the billionaire publisher Malcolm Forbes – as well as a team of sixty-five ‌people to look after them.34 Juan Carlos does not have much need of chauffeurs, however, preferring to drive himself whenever possible – on one occasion, with an almost fatal result: it is claimed that he came close to death in 1990 when he skidded out of control while driving a Porsche 959 on icy mountain roads in the Pyrenees.

  ‌Chapter 6

  ‌Kings Behaving Badly

  King Carl XVI Gustaf, Sweden’s bespectacled monarch, has long been known for two passions: fast cars and hunting elk. In November 2010 his subjects learnt of a third, rather more risqué interest.

  Rumours had long been circulating about the private parties that the monarch organized with a small group of close male friends in the exclusive clubs and restaurants around Stockholm’s Stureplan. Affluent and aged, like him, in their early sixties, these are mostly people the King has known for years and in whose company he feels safe. During a visit to the country that summer I was told by a member of parliament of an incident involving a friend’s twenty-something daughter who had been approached on the street in Stockholm by two young men and told that the King would like to “invite her to a party”.

  A few months later the rumours were splashed all over the pages of the newspapers not just in Sweden but across the world. In their book, Carl XVI Gustaf: Den motvillige monarken (Carl XVI Gustaf: The Reluctant Monarch), Thomas Sjöberg and two fellow journalists painted a vivid picture of the King and his friends’ constant partying and playing around with young women. It was “girls à la carte for the King gang”, wrote the authors, who relied largely on anonymous sources to detail their monarch’s many supposed indiscretions.

  Many of Carl XVI Gustaf’s alleged liaisons appeared to have been fleeting encounters. But the book alleged he had also had a year-long affair at the end of the 1990s with Camilla Henemark, a half-Nigerian, half-Swedish singer turned actress. Its authors claimed that Queen Silvia, Carl Gustaf’s German-born wife of thirty-four years, knew about the affair but could do nothing because her husband had fallen in love “like a teenager” with Henemark and the two wer
e talking about escaping to a distant island to “live on coconuts”.

  Ultimately more damaging, though, were claims that the King was putting himself in danger by partying at dubious clubs, including one owned by Mille Markovic, a feared figure in the Stockholm underworld. The King and his friends were said to have regularly had the club to themselves on Mondays for nights filled with elaborate meals and capped with liaisons in a whirlpool with scantily clad would-be models. Markovic was allegedly keen to have the monarch as his patron because it minimized the chances of unwanted visits by the police. Agents from Säpo, the Swedish security service, the book claimed, snooped around in various flats and otherwise pressured women who had partied with the King, ordering them to hand over rolls of film, negatives and photographs – ‌or else face unpleasant consequences.1

  Anticipation ahead of the book’s release had been building for weeks, with vague rumours of its content circulating but few actual details leaking out in advance. Its publication was timed to coincide with the annual elk hunt at the Halle- och Hunneberg reserve on the shores of Vänern in western Sweden, which traditionally ends with the King addressing a press conference.

  The number of journalists who turned up that year was considerably higher than usual. “I have seen some headlines that have not been so nice, and of course I have talked to the family and the Queen,” the King told them. But he declined to comment on a book he had not read. “We will turn a page and move on now because, as I understand it, this is about things that happened a long time ago,” he added. In an interview a few days later with Expressen, the leading Swedish tabloid, Henemark distanced herself from the book’s description of her as a courtesan, but said ‌“we played and had fun”.2 The book sold out almost its entire initial print run of 20,000 copies on the first day.

  The King initially appeared not to have sustained much damage from the claims. A poll by SVT, the public broadcaster, found just a quarter of Swedes thought journalists were right to investigate his private life. But the scandal did not go away, amid reports that Markovic claimed to have photographs in his possession showing the King in a sex club in the same shot as two naked women. To add fuel to the fire, Anders Lettström, one of the King’s friends, admitted contacting underworld figures in an apparent attempt to track down the pictures – although insisted he was acting on his own rather than the King’s initiative.