When I was young, there used to be heated arguments in our family between my royalist mother and my sceptical aunties. My mother would always be saying “They do a lot of good”. My aunties would try to placate her saying, “Its not so much the royals I’m against, its the bloody hangers on!” . By that I believe they meant the more distant relatives of the queen, but one could easily expand that to all the footmen, orders of the garter and all the other lackeys of that institution.
In fact you can’t get a better example of a “hanger on” than the lady described in the ditty below.
