Skipper

Some time ago I urged the replacement of the monarchy with an elected president and received quite a bagful of critical comment, even from quite leftie bloggers. But even they, I suspect, would object to the role of the Attorney General in seeking to keep secret the Queen Mother's will, thus maintaining secrecy over how much inheritance tax the Queen avoided on her mum's £70m fortune(I perhaps ought to use the word 'evaded') on her death. It would seem that the practice began in 1910 to hush up a sexual scandal.

To live in fabulous luxury and bask in the high regard of a nation is apparently not enough for the royals; they have, in addition, to be exempt from the rules by which the rest of us lead our lives. It seems Lord Goldsmith fixed this up with Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss in 2002. It is to the credit of that excellent(and, according to this morning's page 2, prize garlanded) newspaper, The Guardian, that their application for the private court hearing to be challenged has been successful. My partner had to pay £9000 inheritance tax on her father's modest estate- that's nine grand more than our fabulously wealthy head of state.

Slightly more intriguing is the paper's second application, to reveal Princess Margaret's will. It seems an accountant living in Jersey, one Robert Brown, claims to be the latter's illegitimate son. The executors of the royal wills sought to have lawsuit struck down, claiming this person had an 'insane delusion without any evidence'. They also revealed that in 2005 no less than 27 people claimed to be illegitimate relations of the royals. Now, I was always told by my elders in the Shropshire village in which I grew up that 'those royals are at it like knives all the time'; I always dismissed such assertions, but who is to say they were suffering 'insane delusions', when so much evidence has emerged-Charles, Camilla, Andrew etc- to suggest they might have been right?