Poverty at the Palace?

Another day, another tale of cruelty to the old and infirm in Cameron's Britain, as the newspapers are full of reports that an octogenarian lady and her extended family could be forced out of her home due to its advanced state of dilapidation.  Outrageous, I know.  Just another example of the most vulnerable members of our society being let down by those who should be helping them - why, oh, why haven't social services or the like stepped in to help this unfortunate pensioner?  I ask you, how will her majesty cope if she's forced out of Buckingham Palace whilst it is repaired and refurbished?  Surely she can't be expected to set up home in  draughty Windsor Castle, or remote country pile Sandringham?  As for Balmoral, well, it's in Scotland - hostile territory.  Various members of her layabout, universally jobless, family are occupying most of her other palaces, like Kensington and St James.  As for Hampton Court - they let the bloody public wander around there gawping at everything!

I always love it when the right-wing press try to make us feel sorry for the Monarchy by attempting to convince us that these fabulously and wildly over privileged anachronisms somehow suffer the same problems as us ordinary mortals.  They don't.  They live in a different world, (as, apparently, do the editors of the right-wing rags in question).  However, I can't deny that I was moved by the descriptions of the terrible state that Buck House is allegedly in: apparently it all needs rewiring and hasn't been redecorated since the fifties.  It conjures up visions of overloaded old-style two pin plug sockets, with a dozen appliances plugged into a single, sparking, socket, peeling pin-striped wall paper and lumps of plaster falling off of the ceilings.  In other words, something that looks like a seventies TV sitcom depiction of the average working class home.  How can we keep forcing her Maj to keep living in the same conditions the likes of Rag Varney had to endure in 1971?  We should start up a collection for her now, so that she can at least buy some new wall paper.  Perhaps flower-patterned this time.