Did you know that the Duchess of Cornwall is very close to her sister, Annabel Elliot? That’s Annabel standing in front of Prince Charles in the photo above. I think I knew at some point that Camilla has a sister, but I forgot it long ago because we rarely hear about Camilla’s family beyond the sometimes random articles about Camilla’s son Tom. Annabel is a lot less scandalous than most royal relatives, but the Daily Mail is still trying to make something out of the duchess’s sister and something about Prince Charles. By all accounts, Camilla, Annabel and Charles are very close. Annabel and Charles have known and adored each other for decades. Annabel is an interior designer, you see, and Charles has given Annabel endless commissions for various properties, which means Charles has been funding Annabel consistently for years. I think that’s supposed to be the scandal.
Annabel’s commissons. Annabel’s latest commission is the design of a hotel and pub in the middle of Charles’ model village, Poundbury: “The pub-cum-hotel has risen majestically in the centre of Poundbury, Prince Charles’s model village on the outskirts of Dorchester, and will be named The Duchess Of Cornwall — after Annabel’s elder sister — when it opens in October.”
How much has Annabel made off of Charles? “Inevitably there is renewed gossip about Mrs Elliot receiving more sustenance from her sister’s royal table — annual accounts of the Duchy, which provide Charles with his multi-millionaire lifestyle, reveal it has paid Annabel £1.5 million for goods and design services since Camilla, 69, married the Prince in 2005.”
Annabel just copied the design for the Ritz Hotel in Mayfair. “Friends have noticed that the building, which Charles refers to as Poundbury’s new ‘pub’, bears a striking resemblance to Mayfair’s imposing Ritz Hotel, a place to which the Prince has a great sentimental attachment. It was at the Ritz in January 1999, at a party celebrating Annabel’s 50th birthday, that Camilla famously emerged from the shadows to be photographed with Charles in public for the first time. Some in his circle see the similarity in the neoclassical style of the two buildings as more than just a coincidence — since the new pub will perhaps always remind Charles of that key moment in his bid for public acceptance of Mrs Parker Bowles as his official consort.”
Annabel is always around. “Annabel herself, of course, has been the most constant element of all in Charles and Camilla’s romance (she and businessman husband Simon Elliot even accompanied the couple on their honeymoon to Balmoral). Now she is busily designing the pub’s 20 spacious bedrooms, bestowing on them her traditional, rather chintzy country-house style. It’s the same comfortable decor she has installed in some 25 of the 700-year-old Duchy’s holiday-let cottages in the Scilly Isles, Cornwall and Wales.”
Why does Charles keep hiring Annabel? “Wouldn’t it have been wiser for the Prince of Wales to ensure his Duchy employed someone other than his sister-in-law — perhaps someone Welsh — to do up at least a few of the cottages? Now comes the major Poundbury project. And once again, it is Mrs Elliot who gets the lucrative nod…The organisation has not put the interior design work out for tender. It says the Prince is ‘very happy with Mrs Elliot’s work’, adding that work doesn’t have to be put out for tender because the Duchy is a private estate. Some might think this description of the estate as ‘private’ — with its 135,000 acres across 23 counties, but mainly in Devon and Cornwall, and encompassing such national landmarks as South London’s Oval cricket ground — is stretching it just a bit.”
Camilla isn’t getting her sister these jobs though: “But in fact, we understand it wasn’t the Duchess who suggested Annabel create the kind of stylish interiors in Duchy properties that would please the aesthetic tastes of her famously fastidious husband. It was Charles. ‘He adores artistic people,’ explains an aide. ‘In some ways, Annabel has more in common with him than Camilla does.’”
How did I not realize that Camilla brought her sister and her brother-in-law on her honeymoon with Charles? Wow. Well, I guess maybe all of us should review our feelings about the “clingy” Middletons – it might be a case of like father, like son. Charles adores his sister-in-law and wants to give her all of the lucrative contracts he can. And William wants to be a Middleton. So there you go. Also: I love the shade about Annabel’s “chintzy” style.
Photos courtesy of WENN, Getty.
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