Every week for most of this year, a car, often the State Bentley, has borne King Charles out the gates of Clarence House to do something that no British monarch has ever done before – be treated for cancer with the full knowledge of the public.
Only now, after eight months of this scene playing out, it has been revealed that Charles has made a shocking decision – to stop receiving treatment. Temporarily, that is, with he and Queen Camilla set to fly to our neck of the southerly woods this week for an 11-day tour.
But the very fact that the King is willing to take such a step with his treatment (and that his doctors have given him permission) reflects the lengths he is willing to go to, and just how hard he is fighting to keep the monarchy afloat.
And that is a fight that, new details show, he is struggling to win.
Consider the three-minute, softly lit, pastoral Instagram idyll released by Kate, the Princess of Wales last month to announce that she had come to the end of her chemotherapy and what it might tell us about whether the King’s grip is slipping.
Starring in the offering – the longest video ever released by her and husband Prince William – were not only their three young children, but notably and highly unusually, her parents Mike and Carole Middleton.
The chummy tableau – the big smiles, the easy rapport – made the absolute spit of the most cliche-oblivious, warm and tight-knit family.
Just as obvious as the Middletons’ inclusion was the exclusion of a single visual reference or nod to William’s father, or the royal family at all.
It has now been revealed by The Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes that the Waleses’ video “wasn’t signed off by the king.”
As this year has progressed, “executive power and influence is already flowing William’s way.”
He writes: “To get away with such cheek showed William and Kate have an instinctive understanding … of how the power dynamic has shifted since the king’s diagnosis.”
Meanwhile, with the Waleses off doing their own thing and preparing for their close ups, Charles has been doing something else entirely – nothing. Or at least, conserving his energy.
October would normally see the 75-year-old ramping up his workload after the monarch’s traditional Scottish break. Not this time.
“The fortnight in the run up to the royal tour has been kept deliberately light for His Majesty. He will still be undertaking meetings, doing his paperwork and still come down for treatment,” a source has told the Daily Mail.
“Australia is a big deal and he wants to be fighting fit.”
Then there is the tour itself. Legs in New Zealand and Fiji have been nixed and the final itinerary has seen a full rest day pre-scheduled in.
That an 11-day trip, undertaken to the highest degree of luxury and comfort, requires weeks of conserving his energy doesn’t just tell us a story about a man facing down a serious illness, but about a king trying so very hard to hold things together.
A source offered the Beast a pretty blunt assessment about Charles in late August, saying “I think there has been a lot of positive spin about the king doing well, getting back to work and so on. But, you know, he has cancer. He is not well … You only have to look at photographs from now compared to a year ago and it’s obvious; he has lost a lot of weight and aged considerably.”
And yet despite this, the tour is going ahead, indicative of just how much is riding on it.
On the surface, the itinerary for Their Majesties’ Down Under sortie makes for about as exciting reading as Prince Edward’s Tesco receipt (how many packets of plain tea biscuits can one man eat?) The days of a dashing Charles bounding out of the surf in his swimsuit and up a stretch of Aussie sand as the press dutifully snaps away are long past us. (If ever there was a body built for radio …)
His trunks will be staying firmly back in his Clarence House drawers.
Instead, what the King will be doing will be valiantly trying to maintain the status quo the late Queen seemingly effortlessly did for 70 years.
For decades, the monarchy and the dwindling collection of realms such as Australia that still has the monarch as our head of state have existed in a sort of holding pattern. Respect for the late Queen and a certain acquiescence to her distant, slightly maternal rule meant that aside from Malcolm Turnbull occasionally getting a bit hot under the collar, republicanism was never truly on any agendas.
It had always seemed likely that her death would fire the starting gun on the splintering of those 14 realms away from the Motherland and a possible fracturing of the Commonwealth, an organisation whose purpose I am not entirely sure of. (Trade or corn subsidies or something to do with exchanges of undergraduate engineering students?)
Still, it’s in Charles’ and the monarchy’s interests to keep it all glued together and everyone happy, hence the “workaholic” is coming, even over the protests of his good lady wife.
