PM commits to upgrading our defences by 2035. The threat will not politely wait. 👇My article in @Independent

Years after we revealed Charles accepted suitcases stuffed with millions in physical cash and awarded an honour to a Saudi donor who paid for the privilege, the King’s operation is still opaque and opposed to the most gentle scrutiny. The Metropolitan Police ended up investigating his flagship charity such was the scale of misconduct and its chair, its chief executive and trustees quit. Yet the foundation — which receives public funds and champions Charles’s personal philosophy of “harmony” — still struggles with familiar issues: its new chairman and new CEO both left recently. Staff complain of being underworked and overpaid. At one point, billionaire donors were going to be given access to HRH’s taxpayer-funded trip to the Vatican and accompany him to meet the Pope. (I reported on the plan, which was withdrawn.) The monarch officially has no role in his foundation. But he remains involved down to the minutiae and the palace accepted last year he’d grown frustrated at one gardener, of whom he thundered: “Don’t put me in front of that man again!” This was the context in which sources contacted us recently to reveal that the charity had been making tens of thousands of undisclosed “consultancy” payments to the King’s sister in law — Queen Camilla’s sister. The charity refused to comment for a week but after we approached the Palace, it abruptly acknowledged Annabel Elliot is a consultant providing advice on “branding” and “retail”. This, they claimed, complied with their procurement processes. What that process amounted to they would not say. Sources saw it differently, saying it was difficult to discern the outcome of the work but that it appeared to include accompanying the King on official visits involving the charity and keeping him abreast of internal developments. Claim or counter claim aside, there is no reference to the arrangement publicly or in the “related party transactions” section of accounts — where one would expect to see any payments that could constitute a conflict of interest. The “cash-for-honours”, “cash-for-access”, “cash-in-bags” and “cash-in-suitcases” stories we broke have all been met with cold fury by the palace — but inevitably came from people within or close to it who did not think it helped the monarchy for its institutions to operate without good governance or basic accountability. Read our latest below: