And the big question after the world cup final: where were the royals?

For me, it was always going to be a day embracing both victory and defeat. 

My roots are English, my home is in Spain. So a match between England and Spain for the Woman’s World Cup of football was always going to leave me both happy and unhappy with the outcome, especially as neither side had previously won the championship and both sides deserved the win equally and deserved defeat as little. Inevitably, I was going to be both pleased and disappointed with the outcome.

Spain crowned Women's World Cup champions

My greatest disappointment, though, was with some of the attendance at the game. Or more to the point, the non-attendance. I’m talking royal families here, and if Spain beat England by just one goal to nil on the pitch, when it came to royalty, the scoreline was much more crushing.

The first thing to say is that the British royal family costs a heck of a lot more than the Spanish. The Guardian kindly did a study on the comparative costs to the British taxpayer (leaving aside any private income) of the Windsors in Britain and the Bourbons in Spain. The results are staggering.

The subsidy to the royal family shouldered by the British taxpayer is officially £86m. However, that rises to £127m when we add in the income from the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, which many feel ought to be going to the public purse.

What’s more, the Guardian article was written before the government agreed a 45% increase in the taxpayers’ direct contribution to the family from 2025. This is at a time when the same government is telling us that medics are only worth a 6% increase, plus a flat raise of $1250 for junior doctors. 

The Spanish Bourbons, on the other hand, cost Spanish taxpayers £7.4m. That’s more than fifteen times less and means that if the British royal family reduced its subsidy from taxes to the same level as in Spain, Britain could save nearly £120m a year, even before the forthcoming increase At a time when there’s controversy in Britain about the failure to build a promised number of new hospitals, that level of savings would pay for a new hospital every four years. 

Of course, the royalists would immediately tell me that the Windsors do so much for the country in various intangible ways. Mostly they’re to do with expressing the feelings of the people and enhancing the prestige of the nation. So here’s my question: where is the nation’s prestige more at stake, and where have the people’s feelings been as widely engaged, as in the fortunes of the Lionesses team in the 2023 Women’s World Cup?

Surely someone from the royal family ought to have been at the final.

Now Spain has a serious political problem to solve at the moment. The recent general election left no party with a parliamentary majority allowing it to govern. It’s far from certain that even with carefully constructed and highly unstable multi-party coalitions, a majority government can emerge. The King is due to hold conversations with seven parties over the next few days to explore possibilities.

In the circumstances, it’s understandable that neither he nor any leading politician could be spared to travel to Australia for the World Cup final. But still someone went, and frankly a pretty appropriate choice. Spain sent its Queen, Letizia, to encourage its women’s team.

And Britain? The royal family sent no one. Prince William, the next in line to the throne, who is even President of the English Football Association, decided he couldn’t go and just sent a message of encouragement instead. 

There’s a website which allows the public to find out what the royal family’s future engagements are. I can find nothing on it for any member of the family on the day of the Final. Nothing, at least, that they’re prepared to admit to on this public website.

They cost well over fifteen times more than the Spanish royal family, but the British royals couldn’t find anyone to attend the biggest sporting event involving a British team for years. 

Failing any of the official royals going, couldn’t we at least have swallowed our pride and contacted Meghan Markle to ask her to go? At least she has glamour and apparently a capacity for empathy. Come to think of it, that might even have made her a better choice than any of the pompous dullards from the official side.

In any case, I fully understand that there’s a huge majority in Britain for retaining the monarchy. But, hey, guys, they’re the paid servants of the British people. The hugely well-paid servants. Couldn’t we at least ask them to do what they’re paid for?

After all, we demand that in spades from our junior doctors.