ew York has had an unusual influx of British royalty of late. Prince Harry was there on a three-day working visit in June and two weeks later his grandmother the Queen made her first speech to the 192-member General Assembly of the United Nations in more than half a century. Last time Her Majesty addressed the UN was in 1957, when she was 31 – just four years after she was crowned and little more than a decade after the organisation officially came into existence.    The 100-degree heat in New York City is enough to exhaust anyone, let alone an 84-year-old who had just completed a nine-day official tour of Canada. Fortunately both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, 89, have extraordinary stamina and deal with climatic extremes and whirlwind travel without ever showing fatigue.    Sadly for the Queen the new coalition government has decided to freeze the £7.9 million a year Civil List payments. This is made more difficult as Her Majesty hasn’t received an increase in her annual allowance for 20 years, and because of inflation, today it is worth only a quarter of what it once was. As a result the monarch has been forced to dip into a reserve fund built up during the last decade to make ends meet. The Royal Household must find £7 million this year and next from its own coffers but by 2012, Diamond Jubilee year, there will be nothing left.    The Chancellor of the Exchequer praised the Queen for ‘clever housekeeping’, which entails a great deal more than turning off lights and keeping the heating down. Palace economies have been so efficient that the Treasury contributed the equivalent of just 62 pence per person in the United Kingdom to enable the Queen to carry out her duties as head of state.    On a much happier note, the Queen and Prince Philip are to become great-grandparents in December. The monarch is said to be ‘delighted’ at the news that her first grandchild Peter Phillips and his wife Autumn are expecting their first child.    In the tiny principality of Monaco, meanwhile, Prince Albert has finally announced his engagement to Charlene Wittstock, a former Olympic swimmer, whom he has been dating for several years. Comparisons are inevitable with his mother, the beautiful and irreplaceable Princess Grace, who died in 1982 following a car crash; she is a very hard act to follow but Monegasques are hoping that once South African-born Charlene is married she will step into the late princess’s shoes and produce a royal heir. Albert does have two children from previous relationships, but since neither is legitimate they are excluded from the line of succession.    Prince Albert, 52, has yet to achieve the popularity of his late father, Prince Rainier, but it seems likely that marriage will bring much-needed stability to Monaco’s royal family. He has hinted that the wedding will take place in the summer of 2011.