Readers of The Royalist will not be exactly dumbfounded to learn that Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie have been living in some of the finest real estate in London for close to two decades without paying a penny in rent.
I know. Contain your amazement.
Princess Beatrice having a lovely time last night with Stacey Bendet and Emma Thynn, Marchioness of Bath. After this, she scooted home to her equally lovely London apartment that she pays no rent on! (Photo by Max Cisotti/Dave Benett/Getty Images for ALICE + OLIVIA)
Still, even by the standards of the British royal family, the details that emerged this morning in a report published by the National Audit Office are genuinely jaw-dropping. The NAO has spent the last several months examining the intricacies of the royal family’s property arrangements (there will be much more on the Royal Lodge revelations across today’s Substack and on my YouTube channel) and what they have uncovered about the living situations of the York princesses confirms, in excruciating detail, everything I have been writing for months about the way this family feathers its own nest with complete disregard for the niceties of the open market.
Princess Beatrice, now 37 and married to Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi (who appears by all accounts to be a wealthy man, with a £3.5 million house in the Cotswolds to go with a successful property development business), was given a four-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment at St James’s Palace when she was 19 years old and about to start university.