Queen Elizabeth Claims Poverty, Asks for Help to Heat Buckingham Palace

Each year, the British government pays £38.2 million for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s expenses. Still, that’s not enough money, since she asked for government help to foot the energy and gas bill for Buckingham Palace, it has emerged.

The petition was filed in 2004 and was almost immediately denied for fear of a public relations disaster, it has emerged just recently, the Daily Mail informs.

Basically, the Queen was asking for more government money to pay the bills for two of her palaces – but she wanted the money to come from funds assigned to low-income people in need of assistance.

Apparently, the gas and heating bill for Buckingham increased by more, coming to total about £1 million, an expense the Queen can’t cover from her yearly grants.

“[Royal aides] complained that the £15 million government grant to cover the Queen’s palaces was inadequate and her energy bills had become ‘untenable’,” the Mail says.

“The money would have come from £60 million of energy-saving grants reserved for cash-strapped families, housing associations and hospitals,” the same publication informs.

Because of this, the petition was denied. Further attempts to get the money also proved futile.

“The Independent newspaper reports that the Queen’s deputy treasurer also wrote to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport for a grant to replace four heating and power units at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle,” the Mail also says.

Not only that, but recent documents also suggest the government has now a much tighter control over the Queen’s finances, in what Professor Gary Slapper of the Centre for Law at the Open University sees as the final bow of monarchical power.

“It is, in effect, a formal farewell to one of the vestiges of monarchical power,” Prof. Slapper says for the aforementioned publication.

“The legal power and influence of the British monarchy has been slipping away for centuries and this memorandum makes clear and concrete that the ultimate power over the monarch and money is held by a minister from an elected government,” he adds.