Palace accidentally shares King Charles cancer update
Nine months after starting treatment, two words suggest that things are about to change for King Charles.
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If you need something to brighten your day today, I recommend this: imagine the Queen
Victoria, the Empress of India’s face, finding out that great, great, great, great-grandson would one day spend his precious down time in a country she charmingly referred to in her journal as one of her “coloured possessions” trying out colonics?
But like death and taxes, there are some things even royalty can’t dodge like the finger of bad health which was why King Charles was at an Indian ayurvedic wellness centre recently enjoying a bit of R’n’R’n’C. (Well, I’m guessing about the colonics.)
His Majesty has cancer, which is about the sum total of what is known about him. Not what type he has, not how soon it was caught and not what sort of treatment he has been having.
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That’s why when any crumb of new information about his health, no matter how meagre or scant, emerges we pounce on it like Sherlockian obsessives armed with magnifying glasses and desperate for any clues about just how the King is doing.
And that is exactly what we have today thanks to his son Prince William who has just been in South Africa for his Earthshot Prize. There the prince gave a surprisingly emotional interview, revealing that this year with not only his father but wife Kate, the Princess of Wales’ cancer diagnoses had been “dreadful”, “brutal” and “probably the hardest year in my life”.
According to the Telegraph, “Sources close to him confirmed that the outlook was more positive now that both his wife and his father have moved into the next phase of their cancer journeys.”
Hear that? “Next phase”! Someone bust out the party pack of streamers because this sounds shockingly like good news.
Excitement aside, the question is, what the Dickens does “next phase” actually mean? Can we extrapolate that, given that Kate has finished her months’ worth of chemotherapy, news announced in September by a high-end, high-budget video and is motoring along on the road to recovery, that the King is too?
Maybe all those prayers have been answered and the almighty decided to cut Charles some slack.
Of late, there have been other glimmers of regal hope in a year that has really served up plenty of dark.
October saw the King and his good lady wife and reluctant traveller Queen Camilla fly to
Australia and Samoa for nine days of flag waving and Antipodean glad-handing, a tour that saw Their Majesties met with shockingly large crowds, including 10,000 people at the Opera
Buckingham Palace’s state-of-the-art MS DOS word processors were busy whirring and
grinding out lines about how successful the whole thing had been before Charles and
Camilla’s RAF flight had even crossed the equator. Within 24-hours of the jaunt being over, the Palace was busy briefing the Daily Mail’s Rebecca English that the 75-year-old crown-owner had felt “lifted” by the tour and his aides were already planning a “full program” of overseas tours for 2025, “following a new vote of confidence in his health from his doctors”.
Several days after that the Mirror popped up to report that the King and Queen could be off to Italy next year, a trip that had been slated for William and Kate to undertake this year before the princess’ cancer was discovered.
But before anyone gets too cocky and pleased there are other indicators that are less rosy-cheeked and which are reminders that Charles is still a man very much in the midst of his cancer journey.
A fact that has gone largely unreported is that throughout His Majesty’s months-long summer holidays in Scotland, every single week Charles made the 1,600km round trip back to London to receive treatment.
Last month, a palace spokesman told the Times that it was “too early to say” how long
Charles’ treatment would continue on for.
And, as successful as the Australia tour was, it was no easy feat. In the lead up to the trip, the King took time out to really rest up, his doctors had to give him permission to take 11 days off treatment for the tour, he travelled with two person doctors who were supported by on the ground medical teams, there was an entire rest day built into the schedule, no evening engagements were undertaken, and on the way back to the UK, their Majesties broke up their travel by spending four days at that Bangalore wellness retreat. (‘More ghee, Your Majesty?’) All in all, after the tour, the King took nine days off of public-facing duties.
The toll of this international gallivanting is clear – last Tuesday the Palace announced that
Camilla has a chest infection which saw her bow out of two of the most important events in the royal calendar, the Festival of Remembrance at Royal Albert Hall and then the ceremony at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. These are not absences that would have been undertaken lightly, given that the Queen’s pride in her father Bruce Shand having served during World War Two and that she is the Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Lancers amongst other honorary military titles.
With Charles, what remains is a much bigger problem the Palace has for which there is no easy solution – that is, figuring out what is the right amount of information to share regarding His Majesty’s health. Really, it’s a lose-lose situation and no matter what they do, there is only downside and more downside to choose from.
If they ever went the full disclosure route, courtiers run the risk of everyone becoming an armchair oncologist and a bevy of pundits descending onto breakfast TV by the dozen to speculate about the King’s prognosis. Also, there is the possibility of sparking panic in the UK at a time when the newbie Labour government has really set the cat amongst the pigeons and the National Health Service is about one sneeze away from total collapse.
The Palace’s other option, a totally zip-lipped refusal to share anything of any real value would only add a certain squirrely timbre to things but it wouldn’t wash in an age where Charles has committed to flinging opening the windows and doors of monarchy, quite in the case of the Palace’s East Wing, and letting punters in for the first time. Plus we live in an age where there is a certain moral imperative to sharing.
But at least for now we know this – Charles in his “next phase”, whatever that means, so let’s all continue praying or chanting or manifesting or downright good old-fashioned hoping that his prognosis is on the upward sweep and that his aides can stop aggressively plinking the ‘C’ key on their typewriters soon.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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