"The Empress of Extravagance: How the Queen Mother left behind more than £7m in debts"

Daniel M. Ryan — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 14:31:39 GMT

The Daily Mail has a exposure of the recently-deceased Queen Mother's expenditures, which habitually outstripped her income:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=506198&in_page_id=1879

I note, but not cheekily, that John Maynard Keynes was raised to a barony when the Queen Mother was still Queen - when her husband was the still-living King George VI - and that there were few, if any, criticisms of her as something akin to a new Marie Antoinette.

We all know that Lord Keynes did not get his peerage because of the supposed excellence of his writings on economics. Myself, I had thought that he had gotten it by fending off Wilsonism, a political duty which would have been very welcome in the Offshore Island (not to mention Empire, which Great Britain still was at the time.) This article, though, supplies a better reason than the one I had: John Maynard Keynes manfully did a baron's duty to save Queen and Throne!

I leave one excerpt which you may find amusing: "The Queen Mother's treasurer for almost 40 years, the Old Etonian baronet Sir Ralph Anstruther, suffered a complete breakdown in health, believed by some to be the result of his increasing anxiety over the state of her finances." FYI: a baronetcy is a hereditary knighthood, and is the closest British rank to Edler, Ludwig von Mises' own until the fall of the Habsburg dynasty in Austria.

History

"The Empress of Extravagance: How the Queen Mother left behind more than £7m in debts"