Queen Camilla actually came from a very tight-knit aristocrat-adjacent family. The three Shand siblings were very popular and well-connected. Mark Shand, Camilla’s much-loved brother, passed away in 2014. That just leaves Camilla and her sister Annbel Elliot, and they’re very close. Annabel is an interior designer and she’s had tons of royal and royal-adjacent work thrown her way over the years, with Camilla’s involvement, of course. Well, as it turns out, Annabel was actually “on the payroll” of the Duchy of Cornwall for the past twenty years, when her sister’s husband was the Prince of Wales. We’re only learning that now that Prince William is PoW, and William removed his stepmother’s sister off of the duchy’s payroll. Plenty of people knew that Annabel did a lot of decorating work for Charles over the years, but we had no idea that she had been fully collecting a salary for two decades. Looks like William wasn’t happy with the mild criticism he received by withholding his tax information, so he offered up this gossip nugget:
The Prince of Wales has removed the Queen’s interior designer sister from the payroll after taking over the Duchy of Cornwall. Annabel Elliot, 75, has been paid several hundred thousand pounds for her services over the last two decades. She was employed by the King, then Prince of Wales, as chief designer of his estates following his 2005 marriage to Queen Camilla, her elder sister. Since then, she has enjoyed an annual cash injection for her work on the Duchy holiday cottage portfolio, decorating and updating its attractive period properties in Cornwall, Wales and the Isles of Scilly.
Sources confirmed that Prince William would no longer employ Ms Elliot, although it was no reflection on her work. The Duchy’s annual accounts detail how she had been paid “in the normal course of business and on an arm’s length basis” varying amounts ranging between £19,625 and £82,272 to maintain its rental properties as well as the Duchy offices and its plant nursery. She was reimbursed additional amounts each year, ranging from £7,160 to £90,285, for the purchase of furniture, furnishings and retail stock.
Ms Elliot was also employed to oversee the refurbishment of a 20-bedroom pub in the centre of the King’s Poundbury development in Dorset and to help convert two cottages and a lodge for guests at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, which the monarch saved for the nation in 2007. The Elliot touch, it was once said, had “proved to be extremely successful”.
However, the latest Duchy of Cornwall accounts, detailing the incomings and outgoings of Prince William’s first full year as Duke of Cornwall, reveal that for the first time in almost two decades, Ms Elliot was not paid for her services during 2023-2024. Her extensive interiors work across the estate is considered complete and the current staff have learnt sufficiently from her, sources said. The Duchy has previously admitted that the contracts for its design work were not put out to tender.
However, all is not lost for Ms Elliot, who is still enjoying some professional benefits from her relationship with the King and Queen. She was recently employed to oversee significant improvements to the visitor centre and restaurant at Balmoral ahead of its opening to the public this summer and Buckingham Palace sources confirmed she would continue to be involved with the household when there are “appropriate opportunities”. Reports suggest that she has also undertaken work on the King’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk over the last 18 months or so. Ms Elliot’s taste certainly chimes with the King’s. She was once quoted as saying that she was “not a white and beige person”.
LMAO. William was really mad. He was mad enough to risk Camilla’s ire. Trust that there will be punishment for this too – Camilla will get her revenge, especially because it involves her sister. It’s not just that William fired Annabel, it’s that he threw her under the bus because he was being criticized for being so selectively privacy-obsessed when it came to his taxes. Really, people might start to wonder if William is keeping any of the Middletons in salaried positions. James Middleton can be the official duchy marshmallow screenprinter. Carole is the Duchy’s Chief Executive of Cheese Toast. Anyway, as for Annabel getting thousands from the Duchy for years… look, she really is a decorator and I’m sure she was picking out fabrics and chairs and such. But yeah, it’s funny as hell.
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