Prince Andrew has not paid rent on his grace-and-favour mansion on the Windsor Estate for two decades, The Times can reveal.
The Times obtained a copy of the leasehold agreement for Royal Lodge, revealing the terms under which the prince lives on the 30-room estate.
It states that, while the prince paid £1 million for the lease plus at least £7.5 million for refurbishments completed in 2005, he has paid “one peppercorn (if demanded)” in rent per year, since 2003.
Or at least, can work.
You know that leasehold reform everyone’s talking about? That’s to try and make all leases work this way – make the upfront payment and then don’t have to make further annual ones.
You know?
In the next Bond film, SPECTRE is revealed to be working on a genetically engineered superbug that once unleashed will destroy all pepper plants in the world. JB breaks into Spectre headquarters to steal their client list, lying around unencrypted on a USB drive. It turns out to be leaseholder beneficiaries of peppercorn rents, hoping to create a new income stream by making pepper priceless. Following capture by SPECTRE sidekicks, Bond escapes, using a pepper spray built into his watch. As he sails off into the sunset with this instalment’s scantily clad supermodel, he has a Bloody Mary for a change (salt, not pepper, please), while an increasingly apoplectic M wibbles about “Quantums, Candidly.”
The next Bond film will feature no scantily clad supermodels, only fat scowling frumps who might possibly actually be blokes and who continually take Bond’s weapon from him (not in that way) and scold him for wrongquip.
Extraordinary ignorance and misinformation from the newspaper of record…
Surely the whole point of a grace and favour property is that you don’t pay rent?
Isn’t the point that the Spare is looked after once he is no longer needed?
Although it is incumbent on the Spare to at least not get caught and be a public embarrassment. A lesson the last two don’t seem to have learned.
I thought the left were extremely keen on tenants rights – that certainly it should not be possible for a landlord to evict a tenant as long as they paid their rent etc. And they are supposed to be extremely keen on equality. Surely they do not think that one person should be evicted at the whim of their landlord but others should not (in many cases even if they don’t pay the rent)?