King Charles has been criticised for ‘working less than seven weeks’ of full-time work in a year, according to an analysis.
Since the Queen’s funeral last September, the monarch – who is 74 and well past the UK’s retirement age of 66 – has carried out an estimated 257 engagements. But according to anti-monarchy campaign group Republic, this adds up to less than the equivalent of seven weeks of full-time work for the year.
The analysis showed that only forty of Charles’s engagements (excluding his visit to Germany) were traditional, public visits where the King might meet people in the street.
It also suggested that more than 60 engagements were the King “receiving” people – mostly officers, diplomats, bishops and senior politicians – and that such engagements typically last 20 minutes.
The highly-critical resarch also stressed that the number of engagements is often inflated by counting single events as multiple engagements, such as the visit to Colchester in March this year, where he visited the castle and library within the space of 90 minutes.
Republic CEO Graham Smith criticised the King’s ‘part-time’ job and slammed him over doing “very little”.
He said that whilst it’s been reported that Charles worked on 161 days over the past year, “the work he does amounts to very little. Of course, what he does do is rarely work as most people would understand it.”
“It’s rare Charles will do a five-day week, quite often weeks go by where he has engagements on just one or two days. There are long stretches of downtime,” Smith added. “For the most part, he simply goes through the motions of carrying out regimented, formal meetings, attending church services or pursuing his own interests.”
He claimed the King, like all the royals, usually will “carry out the minimum required to look useful and important, they’ll arrive for brief visits to small crowds of fans. But for most days of most weeks of the year theirs is a life of leisure.”
According to Smith, since the Queen’s death, the taxpayer has “spent more than £345m on the monarchy, plus an additional £250m on the Coronation, lost an estimated £2bn from the economy as a result of extra bank holidays, and lost an estimated £220m in unpaid inheritance tax.”
“That’s a huge bill to pay for a part-time King who doesn’t work but attends, who has meetings but no real responsibilities. A full-time elected head of state, as they have in Ireland, would cost as little as £5m a year.”
It comes as new analysis showed the King has worked more days in his first 12 months as monarch than his mother did during her first year as Queen.
The analysis from issues of the Court Circular, the official record of the Royal family’s daily activities, revealed Charles has also travelled to all four nations of the UK and attended dozens of official functions.
The late Queen almost matched Charles, having undertaken 157 days of engagements in her first 12 months on the throne, though she had a lighter workload and fewer visits to begin with.
But the monarch didn’t manage to match the pace set by his grandfather.
In comparison with Charles, George VI managed 183 days of engagements in his first year on the throne.
