For years, the British press has pocket-watched the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. It was especially bad when Prince Harry and Meghan first exited the UK and set up in Montecito. There were so many people making very wild claims about what money, if any, Harry had received or inherited from his family. In 2021, Harry’s rep apparently confirmed that while Harry had received money from his mother’s estate, he had not received anything from his great-grandmother’s estate. We’re talking about the Queen Mum, Queen Elizabeth II’s mother, the Scottish-born boozehound. For years, there’s been speculation about a trust left by the Queen Mum for her great-grandchildren. Well, famed royal critic Norman Baker is making some new claims about this alleged trust.

Royal ‘nepo babies’ – even those who are largely distant in line to the throne – continue to profit off the Queen Mother’s £19million ‘trust fund’, helped by ‘extraordinarily generous handouts from the taxpayer’, a royal expert has claimed. Speaking to the Daily Mail, author Norman Baker said relatives including Sam Chatto, grandson of the late Princess Margaret, are able to live largely unburdened by financial worries thanks to an accumulation of ‘gifts’ by the wife of King George VI.

‘There may be a strong wish among the public for a slimmed down monarchy but the Windsor tentacles stretch far and wide,’ the writer, who penned And What Do You Do? What The Royal Family Don’t Want You to Know, the hard-hitting 2019 analysis of royal finances, shared. ‘And so does the royal wealth.’

Baby-faced Sam, 29, who recently popped the question to his university sweetheart with a handmade porcelain ring, is among the beneficiaries.

‘Even distant relations of the King need have no financial worries, including Sam Chatto, grandson of the late Princess Margaret and who announced his engagement a week or so ago to his long-time girlfriend Eleanor Ekserdjian,’ Mr Baker continued. ‘Old Etonian Sam Chatto, along with other marginal royals, can thank Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, for his financial comfort blanket. Back in 1994, she created a tax-minimising £19million Trust Fund specifically for her great-grandchildren.

‘Naturally all parents and grandparents want to do what they can to help provide financial security for their descendants, and in her case, there was a very tidy sum to distribute. The Queen Mother benefited from extraordinarily generous handouts from the taxpayer to the tune of £643,000 a year and over her life had accumulated vast wealth from gifts bestowed on her by star-struck members of the public, including the Castle of Mey in Scotland, for which she paid just £100. It also helped no doubt that she paid her staff very meanly and offloaded as many costs as possible onto the taxpayer.’

The fund was allegedly set up in 1994, and its contents were reportedly to be distributed between all her grandchildren. It was believed they would receive the first payment on their 21st birthday and the second payment on their 40th birthday.

In 2024, a former Palace aide told The Times: ‘There was a trust fund set up at the time. It was a way in which the Queen Mother could set aside money for when her great-grandchildren were older and a way of passing a slice of her estate down in a tax-efficient way. It was a way in which some of her estate could be ring-fenced for them.’

[From The Daily Mail]

I think it’s likely that the Queen Mum did set up a trust to give money to her grandkids and great-grandchildren, but it doesn’t mean that they’ve received huge lump-sum payments. As Baker indicates, the Queen Mum was famously stingy and she was agambler too. My point is that she probably didn’t have a huge estate, so it was unlikely she put that much into a trust for future generations.

Now, something I’ve always wondered is whether Prince Philip set up this kind of trust for his grandkids and great-grandkids. This sounds more like Philip than the Queen Mum, right? I think that might explain some of the squirrely behavior around Philip’s estate too – they don’t want to admit that Philip treated his grandkids equally, or that he left each of them the same amount. Or maybe he left a few grandkids more money than the others.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images, Kensington Palace.