The Queen with the then prime minister, Edward Heath, in 1973, the year Heath’s government put forward the transparency proposals. “As I had recalled he – or rather, I think, his clients – are quite as concerned over the risk of disclosure to directors of a company as to shareholders and the general public. “I have spoken to Mr Farrer,” a civil servant called CM Drukker wrote on 9 November. He proposed that the monarch be exempted. Three crucial pages of correspondence between civil servants at the trade department reveal how, at that meeting, Farrer relayed the Queen’s objection that the law would reveal her private investments in listed companies, as well as their value. It would therefore include a clause granting directors the right to demand that any nominees owning their company’s shares reveal, when asked, the identities of their clients.

The bill sought to prevent investors from secretly building up significant stakes in listed companies by acquiring their shares through front companies or nominees. Matthew Farrer, then a partner at the prestigious law firm Farrer & Co, visited civil servants at the then Department of Trade and Industry to discuss the proposed transparency measures in the companies bill, which had been drafted by Edward Heath’s government. As a result she dispatched her private lawyer to press the government to make changes. The papers reveal that in November 1973 the Queen feared that a proposed bill to bring transparency to company shareholdings could enable the public to scrutinise her finances. The mere existence of the consent procedure, he said, appeared to have given the monarch “substantial influence” over draft laws that could affect her. Thomas Adams, a specialist in constitutional law at Oxford University who reviewed the new documents, said they revealed “the kind of influence over legislation that lobbyists would only dream of”. The website of the royal family describes it as “a long established convention” and constitutional scholars have tended to regard consent as an opaque but harmless example of the pageantry that surrounds the monarchy.īut documents unearthed in the National Archives, which the Guardian is publishing this week, suggest that the consent process, which gives the Queen and her lawyers advance sight of bills coming into parliament, has enabled her to secretly lobby for legislative changes. It requires ministers to alert the Queen when legislation might affect either the royal prerogative or the private interests of the crown. Unlike the better-known procedure of royal assent, a formality that marks the moment when a bill becomes law, Queen’s consent must be sought before legislation can be approved by parliament.

Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFPĮvidence of the monarch’s lobbying of ministers was uncovered by a Guardian investigation into the royal family’s use of an arcane parliamentary procedure, known as Queen’s consent, to secretly influence the formation of British laws. The scale of Queen Elizabeth’s wealth has never been disclosed but she feared a 1973 bill would allow the public to scrutinise her finances.

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