Because of all the rows about the former Prince Andrew, people have been looking at the Crown estates, what they are, how they work and who benefits from them.

So let’s get back to history. The beginning of the reign of George II in 1760, the King was meant to pay for a large slice of the government, and this came out of the Crown estates.

Go back to Elizabeth I, the royal income was made to pay for the whole of Government. This had become impractical in the 18th century, and George II did a deal.

He handed over the crown of States for his reign, and in return got a civil list, an amount which could be used to fund the living expenses of the monarchy – indeed of the whole Royal Family.

This carried on with various changes, uprating for inflation of the civil list until the sovereign grant was introduced in about 2010, which gave a percentage of the Crown Estate’s revenue to the Crown – subsequently, of course, King Charles III.

That is an income from which the functioning of the Royal Family is meant to take place.

But the Crown Estates are the patrimony of the King. They don’t belong to anybody else.

They don’t belong to you, the taxpayer. They don’t belong to the Government. They are the King’s property, which he pays, probably in reality, a higher tax rate than anybody else in the land, because he gives most of it to his Government.

It is, after all, His Majesty’s Government. The land originates in the mists of time.

A lot of it, of course, would have been taken by William the Conqueror, and then quite a chunk would have been taken from the monasteries when the monasteries were dissolved in the 16th century.

What the Crown Estate owns? It owns Regent Street. It owns vast swathes of the centre of London, it owns Pall Mall and so on.

And revenue comes from this, and it’s now shared between the King and his subjects in the form of His Majesty’s Government.

Within that, the Crown Estates owned properties that the King and his family live in, and these are subject to commercial or semi-commercial leases.

Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, paid £5million for his lease and then has to pay a peppercorn rent every year for the lifetime of this lease. This is utterly standard.

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This is not something that doesn’t happen in other contexts, that people pay an upfront fee and then a peppercorn rent.

It’s how leases historically have often worked. And yet this is what the Public Accounts Committee wants to look into.

And isn’t it just the most enormous waste of time?

So I’ve got in front of me this wonderful book produced by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Chairman’s Office for Budget Responsibility. And I’ve turned to page 132 because it lists welfare spending from 2024 to 2031

And we’re not talking about a few million pounds, a few hundred thousand pounds. We’re not talking about an odd little lease.

We’re talking about an increase in welfare spending from £314.7billion of your money to £406.2billion expenditure of your money and the dear old Public Accounts Committee doesn’t want to prioritise this.

It wants to prioritise the housing arrangements of Princess Alexandra.

Princess Alexandra is a wonderful lady who has served this nation for all of her life, and she lives in a house in Richmond. And that’s what they want to look at?

Surely when this nation is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, as we’re going to be discussing later, we are running out of cash.

We are taxing too much and spending too much. We should be focusing on the big things, not the little things.

And the reason for this is that the committee has got overexcited by a news story.

It has an excellent chairman in the form of Geoffrey Clifton Brown, but unfortunately he has a Labour and Lib Dem majority on his committee who have been pushing to look at something that they think will make them look pretty in the camera lights, rather than getting on with their proper job.

Public Accounts Committee is the most distinguished committee in Parliament.

It was set up in the 19th century to make sure the Government spent your money properly, still doesn’t spend your money properly, but nonetheless, there’s a committee that looks at it.

Surely it should be looking at the big items, what matters, what affects you, the way taxes are raised and spent, not on the trivia that they hope will get them onto the news at 10.

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