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etween two funds managed by two different people who are not allowed to
communicate with one another, the chances of anyone outside the Inland Revenue
reaching an accurate estimate of her assets and income are, therefore, remote. Even the
figure of £1.15 billion does not make her in any sense the richest individual in Britain:
in 2001 this placed her only at the bottom of the league of Britain’s twenty richest
people.
Elizabeth is not an extravagant person; she does not enjoy spending money on herself
or anybody else, nor does she have expensive tastes. The Palace cars might be Rolls-
Royces, but they are certainly veterans. ‘Two of the big ones are thirty-two years old,’ a
court official said. ‘One she still uses is forty years old; it was a wedding present from
the Royal Air Force… She hadn’t had a new car for twenty years or so when the
Association of Motor Manufacturers and Traders made one for her as a Jubilee present;
that was delivered in 1978.’ Twenty years later the Association presented her with a
new car as a golden wedding present, another is being designed for her Golden Jubilee.
Although she has very fine wine cellars at Buckingham Palace and Windsor, Elizabeth
and her children are very abstemious. No wine is served in the private dining-room
unless the family are entertaining guests, and then Elizabeth will have a gin and
Dubonnet before lunch and two Martinis in the evening (mixed by Philip), one of which
she will take in with her. Normally when they are together at lunch she will have water
and Philip a glass of beer. Neither of them eats cooked breakfast and when they are
alone they have just one course and cheese, with which Elizabeth always likes to have a
piece of celery. Her weakness, like her mother’s, is for chocolate, and tea is her favourite
meal. She likes to make the tea herself using the swivel-mounted kettle which Philip
designed for her.
Elizabeth’s one extravagance is her racing and even that is kept as far as possible on a
business-like basis. She is no longer one of the leading owners either in terms of horses
in training or of prize money. Racing today is a big-money business and has changed
out of all recognition since the advent of the really big players like the al Mak-toum
brothers two decades ago. The six leading Arab owners, including the four al Maktoums,
have some 200–250 mares each, Elizabeth only twenty. Three-quarters of the Arabs’
horses are bought at public auction with money no object in order to improve their stock
and their chances of winning the big races. Elizabeth rarely buys – partly because she
can’t compete in financial terms and partly because there would be political
repercussions were she to be seen spending vast sums on horses. She races the horses she
breeds. As far as breeding goes, she has one of the small to middling studs in the
country, about 5 per cent of the size of those owned by the al Maktoums. Recently even
they have been overshadowed by the Coolmore Stud in southern Ireland, the biggest
breeding enterprise in the world. Elizabeth has the stud that she inherited on the
Sandringham estate in Norfolk and one at Polhampton, which she bought from the Wills
family in 1972, where she keeps the mares and yearlings. In 1982 she bought West Ilsley
training stables from Sir Michael Sobell and Lord Weinstock for about £750,000,
recouping the money from the sale of her good filly, Height of Fashion, to Sheikh