Column: Royals should pay their own repair bill

It's a public relations disaster for the Royal family because, days later, Prince William – a father of two – admitted he'd ‘struggled with parenthood’. Welcome to the real world. However, unlike the rest of us, he doesn’t have to work full-time to pay the bills because we do that for him. He doesn’t have to worry if one of his children falls over and cracks open their head that he’ll have to sit and wait in A & E, staffed by underpaid nurses. There’s no two-week wait for a doctor’s appointment in William’s world either, because he has royal physicians on speed dial. He doesn’t have to concern himself with getting up at 6am every morning to travel to work in all weathers to put a meal on the table for his children, or to have to try and rent or buy a property in a catchment area for a better school so that his kids at least stand a fighting chance of securing a decent education with job prospects at the end of it all. William doesn’t have to endure sleepless nights, worrying how his children will pay back their astronomical student loans because the government takes money from us to give to him and the rest of his super-wealthy family. He doesn’t have to fret about the mortgage, electricity, or gas bill, or choose between paying them or buying his children a new pair of school shoes. Unlike us, William gets to spend as much time as he likes with his kids because he doesn’t have to hold down a 9 to 5 job for a minimum wage, with a clock-watching boss. But that’s not all, he complains that he finds the materialism of the world 'quite tricky'. Poor lamb. Well, if he and his family would like to share their wealth and pay the Buckingham Palace repair bill themselves, then that would be grand. Then we’d be able to pump the £369 million pounds back into our wonderful NHS and pay our brilliant nurses a decent wage. Some people say having too much can almost be as bad as not having enough, but the people who say this obviously haven’t had to rely on a foodbank to feed their children. I haven’t, either, but someone needs to stick their head above the parapet and point out what an obscene amount of money this is to shell out when we’re faced with a national housing crisis. The NHS is also in crisis with austerity forcing cuts in front line services, but, hey, the Palace hasn’t been decorated since 1952, so let’s pay for tha. I think it’s time the Royals lived in the real world and paid their bills . like the rest of us.