The old drug addict and female pervert the Queen Mother's Final Year Cost More Than You'll Earn in Your Entire Life In her final year of life, 2001 to 2002, the Queen Mother spent approximately4 million pounds.4 million in 12 months. She was 101 years old. She had 100 servants. She was drinking Krug champagne daily. She was maintaining four residences she barely visited. She was keeping raceh horses she could no longer watch run. and she was already £7 million in debt. Let me walk you through where every penny went. But first, one number. Keep it in your head. 4 million divided by £365 days. That's £10,959 every single day. Call it 11,000. Now, in 2001, the median gross annual salary for a full-time worker in the United Kingdom, according to the Office for National Statistics, was 20,061. The Queen Mother's household burned through more than half of that before lunch. The full annual salary gone in under 2 days. A minimum wage worker in 2001 earning £410 an hour would have taken home roughly £8,500 for an entire year of full-time work. The Queen Mother's operation consumed that in less than 19 hours. And she did this while carrying debts that would have bankrupted any family in Britain several times over. So, let's open the invoice. Line item one staff wages 2.5 million per year. This is the big one. 60% of the total bill right here. She employed approximately 100 people. Not 100 people running a hospital. Not 100 people operating a hotel. a hundred people dedicated to ensuring that one elderly woman's days unfolded with the exact choreography she'd come to expect over six decades of widowhood. The hierarchy at Clarence House hadn't changed since the Eduwardian era. At the top, her private secretary, Sir Alistair Erd, who'd held the role since 1974. nearly 30 years of managing correspondence, diary, and finances for a woman who viewed economy as a concept applicable to other people. Below him, the comproller running domestic operations. Equaries serving or retired military officers acting as personal attendants. Ladies in waiting managing social correspondents. Senior positions like these commanded salaries likely in the 40 to60,000 pound range, though exact figures were never published because why would they be? Then came the engine room. Butlers, footmen, pages, housekeepers, cooks, kitchen staff, chauffeers, dressers, housemaids, gardeners, and one man who defies easy categorization. William Talon, known to everyone as Backstairs Billy, whose official title was page of the backst. Talon walked into royal service in 1951 at 16 years old and didn't leave for 51 years. Half a century, one job, one woman. And what a job it was. Talon didn't just serve the Queen Mother, he ran her. or at the very least he ran the domestic machinery that made her daily existence possible. And over five decades the distinction between those two things dissolved entirely. His domain was the back stairs, the private corridors and service passages of Clarence House that the public never saw. And from that position he controlled access, managed the flow of drinks, orchestrated the entertaining, and decided with increasing authority as the queen mother aged who got in and who didn't. Tom Quinn's biography of Talon describes a man who had effectively built a court within a court. Clarence House under Talon's stewardship wasn't a welloiled machine. It was a thief. He was flamboyant, fiercely loyal, and reportedly difficult with colleagues. Staff who fell out of his favor found their lives at Clarence House intolerable. Staff who stayed in his good graces found a world of remarkable privilege, access to fine wines, leftovers from the queen mother's kitchen, and the reflected social capital of proximity to royalty. Here's the thing about a household where the principal is a hundred years old and increasingly dependent on others. Power doesn't vanish. It migrates. By the queen mother's final years, she was frail. Her eyesight was fading, and her mobility required constant assistance. The decisions about daily life, what was served, who visited, how the household functioned hour by hour, had largely devolved to the senior domestic staff. Talon, as the person physically closest to the queen mother for most of her waking hours, wielded influence that far exceeded his formal rank. He poured her gin. He managed her champagne. He controlled the atmosphere of her evenings. And because she trusted him completely and because she was in no position to audit the operation herself, the household ran according to his rhythms as much as hers. The staff wage bill of 2.5 million wasn't paying for efficient domestic service. It was paying for a parallel court, an institution that had developed its own internal politics, its own hierarchies of favor and disfavor, its own logic of self-perpetuation. When the Queen Mother died and Prince Charles moved his operation into Clarence House, up to a 100 staff were told they could face redundancy. ...