Increasing the Civil List

According to the Grauniad, the Queen lacks the funds “to properly maintain some royal residences”.

Surely this means that the royalist claim that the Queen earns for the country more than she costs is on somewhat shakier ground?

If nothing else, I find it very hard to muster up any sympathy for the fact that she can’t maintain all of her various residences; most people manage on much less than £41.5m a year, partly by only having the one house to live in.

(Incidentally, I heard recently a response to the argument that the monarchy earns plenty of money through tourism: France has been a republic for most of the last two centuries, yet people still come to visit Versailles and many other French palaces and so on.)