For something so hollow, the royal family is astonishingly expensive | Polly Toynbee

The trouble with the monarchy is not that it is too powerful but that it is utterly useless, a worthless vacuum shrouded in ceremony

Not My King," say the yellow T-shirts of the anti-monarchists TV cameras may swerve around in the coronation crowds. But he is our king, willy-nilly, like it or not, as he and his family are our dependants. The Guardian's deep dive into the royal family's finances shows our monarchy costs a fortune, more than anyone else's in Europe.

The Borbones of Spain cost a mere 7.4m a year, while we pay our Windsors a very pricey 86m. And that's before we add in the roughly 40m a year in revenues from their Duchy estates - adding up to 1.2bn over the years. That's not much really, monarchists may claim. Out of 1tn in annual government spending, the royals' consumption of taxpayers money is a mere bagatelle, a fleabite.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist