We’re finally getting a good look at the royal finances. It shouldn’t take this long, it shouldn’t be up to them to provide them, and we shouldn’t have to ask, but at least we now have access.

It looks like objective data, but of course people will bring very different sets of eyes to these figures. Opponents of the monarchy will look at them as an example of unearned privilege – a huge sum, grotesquely disproportionate to any normal household’s finances, achieved simply by virtue of bloodline. A remnant of the feudal past, surviving by some mad twist of fate in the modern era.

The other way of looking at the numbers is as a kind of constitutional expenditure. We’re not paying to keep an old man and his wife in the style to which they have become accustomed. We’re paying to maintain a non-political, head-of-state role in the British constitutional structure – a space outside of politics which everyone can associate with, a kind of universal valve for national identity.

Interpreted in those terms, the numbers........

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