‘Royal Watcher’ Keeps Tabs on All the Windsor Riches

The Queen of England is worth well over 2,000 times her weight in gold.

Roughly.

In mere money, the 126-pound monarch, almost certainly the world’s richest woman at any weight, possesses somewhere between $1.72 billion and $2.04 billion. And--here’s the good part--it’s all tax free.

Moreover, a good chunk of the royal private fortune derives from gifts, some dating back to the days of Queen Victoria, of jewels, land and hefty sums of cash from maharajahs, sheiks, sultans and subjects who show no signs of turning off the tap to the sovereign--or her family.

These estimates are made by Andrew Morton, professional “royal watcher,” who traced the British royal family’s private holdings--in precious gems, estates, art, investments, race horses, automobiles, even a stamp collection--to come up with what he claims is the best guess yet of how rich the royal family really is.

Of course estimates of the royal riches are cranked out regularly, in what amounts to a mini-industry. Last September, Fortune magazine put the queen’s worth at $10.9 billion. Other estimates have varied wildly over the years from a few paltry millions to as much as $26 billion, all of which Morton maintains are skewed by questionable motive or bad information.

“There is this huge wall of secrecy surrounding anything to do with the royal family,” Morton said in an interview in Los Angeles. “Everybody thinks they know everything about the Windsors. They know nothing. The often used image is that the Windsors live in a goldfish bowl. If it’s a goldfish bowl, it’s one that’s been blacked out.”

Morton has laid out his stalking of the royal finances in a new book published simultaneously here and in Great Britain, where it was excerpted in a national newspaper and is due to be serialized in other publications.

“Theirs Is the Kingdom: The Wealth of the British Royal Family” is studded with the usual royal tidbits: a Canadian air force jet being dispatched to return Prince Charles’ “beloved” crocodile shoehorn left behind on a visit to Winnipeg, the queen diverting her yacht so that she could mail a letter, for instance.

But the core of the book is a cold-eyed banker’s assessment of the origins and disposition of the private wealth that supports the House of Windsor. One chapter traces the development of the family’s finances from Queen Victoria to the present, including deductions based on the limited evidence available about the current queen’s stock portfolio, apparently brimming with mining and electronic issues and estimated to be worth $595 million to $680 million by Morton.

“I hired somebody for two months who was a proper stocks and shares expert to look into this thing because their (the royal family’s) stocks and shares are disguised by something called the Bank of England nominee accounts, which were set up by the government in order specifically to shield the queen’s investments from investigation,” Morton explained.

The book’s appendix includes an inventory of “known” royal jewels, estimates of land values and income from estates and other holdings, including a shopping center.

The inventory of Queen Elizabeth’s private jewelry--as opposed to the crown jewels and other property held in public trust--includes a tiara last seen in public in 1911 with an estimated value of $600,000 and a 94.4-carat diamond valued at $9.5 million. The assessment made for Morton puts the total value of the diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls and sapphires at $60.6 million to $71 million. It is a conservative estimate and does not include the market value--up to 10 times or more of assessed worth--that would be added because of their royal ownership, according to Morton.

During his investigation, Morton said he bumped into a lot of obstacles--laws that shroud royal investments in secrecy, uncooperative sources close to the royal family and the family’s own fierce protection of its privacy. For example, since the time of Queen Victoria, royal financial advisers have taken “the secrets that they have to the grave,” he said.

Morton is the author of seven books about the royal family, a former newspaper correspondent who covered the royal beat and now proprietor of Palace Press, an independent news agency specializing in news and features about the royal family. But even for him, Morton admitted, much of royal life is unknown territory. Not only that, but the royals are protected by a “global myth machine” that further obscures the difference between royal image and reality, Morton said.

“The royal family, like the best actors, put on a very good display for the public but in private they are very different people,” he continued. “They’re not everything that the public thinks. For example, the royal family today lives very much the way Queen Victoria did. Prince Charles, this man who is described as ‘everyman, the crusading prince,’ still goes grouse shooting with kings, dines with billionaires and millionaires in exactly the same way that Edward VII did a hundred years ago.”

One instance of royal obfuscation occurred in 1986 when a sapphire and diamond ensemble was omitted from the list of official gifts made to the Prince and Princess of Wales by the Sultan of Oman, Morton said. The ensemble, estimated to be worth $1.7 million and designated as a private gift, was only admitted to exist a year later when the Princess happened to wear them in public, he added.

Morton theorized that this royal reluctance “rightly shows the embarrassment they feel” about receiving such lavish gifts.

Like the monarchy itself, the giving of gifts to the royal family is an enduring anachronism, Morton said. “I find the psychological and sociological aspects of it just fascinating,” he said. “Why give to the richest woman in the world? . . . In a sense it shows that we’re not really that far off from primitive tribes, that we live in a global village and that we still look to the equivalent of the squire on the hill.”

Morton contends, however, that the royal family will not always be able to protect its private wealth and enjoy unique privileges.

In his book he notes, “The Windsors have shrewdly used the shield of their public duties to construct an armor of legal concessions, ranging from their wills to their shares, to deflect the arrows of outrageous inquiry.

“It is a question of fine judgment for the royal family--and ultimately Parliament--about how long their legal and tax advantages, secured by dint of their public role, can coexist alongside their increasingly vocal demands to be left a lone and treated as ordinary people. Ironically the very success of the Windsor dynasty may prove to be its undoing.”