Holding a warrant for the supply of goods to the Royal Family obviously confers a commercial advantage on the firm. It often brings extra sales from tourists or from certain overseas markets. The warrant has to be renewed every five years.It now appears that the royal palaces use the implied threat of losing the licence to bargain down the price of goods supplied. This in turn suggests that the warrants, widely seen by the general public as a guarantee of quality, may not be that at all, but rather a function of preferential treatment for royal customers.
Worse still, it is reported that some royal servants demand substantial discounts from royal warrant holders when buying certain goods for themselves. If so, they are also relying upon the implied threat that the warrant can be removed and using this for their private benefit.All this fits together. For it has become clear that the Royal Family employs a corrupt method for remunerating its staff. Their actual salary is poor but royal servants are able to go some way to make up the difference either by bringing pressure to bear on royal warrant holders, such as certain London department stores, if they are among the better paid, or by selling unwanted royal goods if they are less fortunate. And none of these extras are declared for tax.Thus, to go back to the garden bench, although Charles could say that he personally will not receive a penny of the £12,000 it is expected to fetch, that is not the point. The system of giving unwanted goods to servants for selling on means that they will continue to work for low salaries when they might otherwise refuse to do so.As a result, if the suppositions I have made about the bench were to turn out to be accurate, then we should be faced with the unpalatable fact that the heir to the throne had in effect misappropriated some £12,000 from the public purse. That is the kind of thing which must be examined in even the limited inquiry being carried out by Sir Michael Peat
More from Andreas Whittam Smith.
We all like to think we follow the news, but do we really know what’s going on? Well, of course we don’t know what’s really going on Even our politicians don’t know that. But do we even know what is being reported in the papers?
We all like to think we follow the news, but do we really know what’s going on? Well, of course we don’t know what’s really going on Even our politicians don’t know that. Today I bring you five news stories from the past week or so One is completely made up and fictitious. Can you spot which one? If you’re up for the challenge, here are the five news stories.
Get your thinking-caps on!1) Greater Manchester Fire Brigade is suing a householder in the Wilmslow area for asking them to get involved in arson.Mr Hugo Barrison sent for the firemen on 5 November to come to his bonfire-night party. When they arrived, they found that Mr Barrison had been setting off fireworks, and had kept to the end a vast £175 multiple Roman candle display. However, he had been unable to light it and, unwilling to waste so much money on the night, had sent for the Fire Brigade to enlist its aid.”It is a clear breach of public duty to ask the fire service to set fire to things,” said a spokesman. “We shall be asking for our money back.”2) Kim Howells, the Culture minister who famously dismissed conceptual art as “cold, mechanical bullshit”, has been unexpectedly defended by a group of avant-garde artists called The Bowel Movement.”We think that Kim Howells’s outburst, far from being a philistine display, was actually a good piece of performance art in its own right,” they say ” It was visceral and fiery and got people thinking It certainly got us thinking.