Grandson’s £750k for running HM’s party is twice sum raised for charity
The £750,000 paid to the Queen’s grandson for organising her 90th birthday street party last year is more than double the sum so far raised for charity by the event.
The sum was handed over to SeL UK, the sports management company of which Peter Phillips is a director, for organising last June’s event in The Mall.
Billed as the centrepiece of the monarch’s birthday celebrations, the not- for- profit event was dogged by controversy from its inception because representatives of the Queen’s charities were charged £150 a head to attend.
Critics thought this particularly ironic given that the party – known as the Patron’s Lunch – was designed to celebrate the sovereign’s role as patron of more than 600 charities and organisations.
Now accounts lodged at Companies house show Mr Phillips, son of Princess Anne, was paid £750,000 for a two-year ‘commercial services contract’ to organise the event.
This compares with just £306,000 given to charity as a result of ticket and merchandise sales in the period up to September last year. It has been distributed among 290 charitable organisations for which The Queen acts as a Patron, including the RSPCA and Barnardo’s.
At the launch of the lunch, Mr Phillips, 39, insisted he did not secure the contract because of his relationship to the Queen. ‘I was very conscious to make sure we did this properly, so we went through the normal channels of approaching the palace. We had to show that this wasn’t a case of trying to cut corners because the Queen happens to be my grandmother,’ he insisted.
however he admitted that he had privately. discussedIn the the same event interviewwith her he argued that such events were ‘very expensive’ to put on and with a significant gap between the cost of hosting it and the money coming in from sponsors, he had no option but to charge the charities of which she was patron to attend.
But he refused to disclose how much his company was being paid, citing commercial confidentiality.
SeL UK is a division of Australian sports management company SeL, set up by Mr Phillips at an address in Buckingham Palace Gate in 2012. Its website boasts only three clients, including the Patron’s Lunch and the Gatcombe Festival of British eventing — which takes place annually on Princess Anne’s Gloucestershire estate – plus the Longines Global Champions Tour. According to the company’s latest publicly available figures ( which also reveal Mr Phillips’ wife Autumn as company secretary), there was just £7,730 in the firm’s accounts as of June 2015.
SeL UK and Mr Phillips did not respond to requests for comment yesterday. But Sir Stuart etherington, chairman of the Patron’s Fund, the charity which benefited from the lunch and distributed its profits to good causes, described the fee as ‘reasonable’. he insisted Mr Phillips and SeL UK had not ‘profited’ from the event but was instead remunerated for organising the event and securing sponsorship. ‘On the SeL fee, it was important to the trustees this was undertaken on a non-profit basis.
‘We benchmarked the costs at a higher level than the fee so SeL were not, in our view, securing a profit. Indeed the trustees had a legal agreement that no profit would be made on the contract, so we think the fee is reasonable.’
Sir Stuart also said the publicly available accounts reflected ‘only part of the story’, as several additional donations means the final amount given to charity as a result of the event will rise to £780,000.
‘These accounts are yet to be audited and once all funds available for distribution are dispensed, the Charity will close and its accounts will be filed,’ he added.
Buckingham Palace said: ‘The Patron’s Lunch was an enjoyable and celebratory event which has directly benefited a large number of her Majesty’s charities. Questions about the organisation and financial management are rightly a matter for The Patron’s Fund Board of Trustees.’