The Queen has to realise there is no free ride - just like residents of Benefits Street

Quick, hide the valuables: The Queen is being urged to open Buckingham Palace to the public
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So the Queen must buff up the silver tea service and get her cobweb duster round those chandeliers.

It’s time to get the palaces spick and span for weddings, wakes and Bar Mitzvahs. Yes, it’s party time at Buck House. With longer opening hours for the general public to have a snoop round her kitchen as well. Quite right, too.

MPs are calling upon the Queen to start thinking more ­commercially by opening up the palaces for longer periods and for ­commercial events when she isn’t at home.

The plan is it that will help raise the staggering £50million needed to repair some of her crumbling palaces.

Rightly so. For at a time when most of us can’t afford to gloss the front room, we’re sure as heck not going to fund sprucing up royal bolt holes around the country.

Yet still the proposal from the indomitable Margaret Hodge and the Parliamentary Accounts Committee has met with outraged spluttering from some staunch royalists.

The impudence, they claim, that a woman who has dedicated her life to her nation will be repaid by having her home trampled over by the masses wearing cagoules and carrying thermos flasks.

Yes, the Queen is extremely frugal and careful with the way she spends money from the public purse. Yes, she does work hard on our behalf.

But there is still no way in this day and age the rest of us can subsidise her family’s ­luxurious homes while they continue living the life of... well, royalty.

The Queen is sitting on a fortune. The scandal in all this is that members of her ­household haven’t acted years ago to unleash their ­potential earnings as a way of meeting the massive costs that these palaces create.

And they’ve managed her money so badly that there’s no savings to get the work done.



Dependency: There can be no free rides whether you live in a palace or on Benefits Street

For goodness sake, don’t the royals read all this patronising nonsense being thrown at ­ordinary people about how they’ve got to budget properly?

From this week’s reports, it sounds like some of the whopping 360 ­buildings included in the Royal Estate are collapsing around her ears. Apparently, 39% of them are below “­acceptable condition”, but there’s not enough cash left to do much about it.

As Margaret Hodge points out, the Queen’s boiler at Windsor Castle is 60 years old – and that has to be uneconomic. Although fair play to the boiler – it’s done well.

For the last few weeks we have been drowning in a tsunami of scorn at the antics of those people living on Channel 4’s Benefits Street.

Well, it appears they’re not the only ones who don’t seem to have got the message that you’re not going to get bailed out by the taxpayer every time life goes awry.

And let’s not forget – there are few people with more benefits, and no families costing the British taxpayer more money, than the royal residents of Buckingham Palace Road.

The national view on characters in the TV show is that these people should realise there can be no benefits without responsibility, no free hand-outs and an end to the dependency culture.

I couldn’t agree more. So, throw open Buck House and let the parties begin...

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She should learn to live within her means.