'Lazy' Camilla in yacht row

THE Duchess of Cornwall is to miss almost a quarter of the engagements on her Caribbean tour with Prince Charles to spend more time on a £50 million luxury yacht.

***SEE MORE OF CHARLES AND CAMILLA'S CARIBBEAN TOUR IN TODAY IN PICTURES***

Camilla, who was once accused by senior royal aide Mark Bolland of being "monumentally lazy", will miss 10 of the 44 engagements on the taxpayer-funded tour so that she can "rest" or prepare for other duties on the 246ft superyacht Leander.

Aides said she would be absent from some jobs because they involved subjects specifically of interest to Charles - such as meeting business leaders or discussing climate change.

On other occasions, she will return to the boat for a meal while Charles works through lunch, or go back to the yacht because she needs more time to get ready than her husband.

"There are several occasions when she needs to get back to the boat, such as a State dinner, to give her more time to prepare. A lady needs more time to get ready than a man," a senior royal aide said.

Unusually, Camilla, who flew out to Antigua for a week's holiday with her son Tom, daughter-in-law Sara and their baby Lola before the official visit, is doing no solo engagements during the 11-day sunshine tour of four Caribbean countries.

She and Charles have hired the Leander, a £320,000-a-week yacht at a specially-negotiated discount from British businessman Sir Donald Gosling to tour Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, Jamaica, and Montserrat. The bill will be footed by the taxpayer.

Clarence House has claimed using the yacht instead of flights between the islands will reduce the official party's carbon footprint by 40 per cent. Some environmentalists, however, have argued it will cause more pollution than flying.

In addition, royal officials have declined to estimate the likely cost of the tour, which the couple are undertaking at the request of the Foreign Office.

Their refusal to discuss the cost to the taxpayer comes amid mounting concern at Westminster over the Royal Family's lack of transparency and accountability to Parliament.

A Daily Express investigation has revealed that the Foreign Office, which requests all official overseas visits by the Royal Family, has no idea how much public money has been spent on Charles and Camilla's last few visits to six countries.

It has full financial details about only one visit in the last few years - a £143,000 weekend trip to the United States for Charles to collect an environmental award in January 2007.

And that is only because one MP, Labour backbencher Andrew MacKinlay, asked persistent questions in Parliament about it.

But officials insist that no central records are normally kept of the cost to the taxpayer of royal tours. Buckingham Palace publishes an annual list of the costs of the flights but there is no publicly available information on the costs of accommodation, entertainment, official gifts and other items.

In addition, the Foreign Office refuses to publish any sort of report assessing whether royal tours have met their objectives. Ministers do not provide Parliament with any routine feedback

Mr MacKinlay, the MP for Thurrock and a member of the influential Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, has tabled a series of questions to Foreign Secretary David Miliband about Charles and Camilla's Caribbean trip.

He said the Queen did a wonderful job for Britain but there needed to be much more openness about the financing of the Royal Family.

"We need a properly and openly-funded office for the deputy head of state, which is what Prince Charles is effectively, but there needs to be much greater transparency about how his household spends and receives its money," he said.

"When Charles goes to Jamaica, for example, where he is the deputy head of state, surely that country should be paying for everything, including his security? But I don't think that's what is happening."

"At the moment, it's all smoke and mirrors. And the Foreign Office tends to fudge things."

The revelation that Camilla is missing such a high proportion of engagements and the lack of openness about the cost and effectiveness of overseas trips astonished taxpayers' groups.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: "Since taxpayers are picking up the tab for much of Charles and Camilla's trip, many people will find it surprising that Camilla is not attending more of the functions.

"If the Royal Family use money from the public purse to travel overseas, then taxpayers have a right to know that they are fulfilling their royal duties by seeing information on who they met and what was achieved.

"When people go overseas on business, they report back to their bosses on what they did, so the Royal Family should do likewise."