‘Brutal’: King Charles reaches breaking point
Photographs taken at a massive high-profile event this week have revealed a stark and horrible truth about the royal family’s future.
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Fun. Do you think the royal family knows how to have it?
Between King Charles having once infamously squawked at seeing Glad Wrap for the first time during a dinner party and his penchant for a nice bit of wilted spinach of an evening, it’s debatable.
The photos from this week’s State banquet for the Amir and Sheikha of Qatar don’t do much to help his case. Photos from the night make it look like a painfully stitched up endurance exercise in pointless small talk, lobster and politely not mentioning the possibly thousands of migrant workers who died building Qatar’s World Cup stadium.
So maybe Queen Camilla was the lucky one, getting to skip parts of the Qatari visit as she recovers from pneumonia, including getting to dodge being a part of the official banquet receiving line.
This simple fact – that the Queen is still so poorly and low-energy she couldn’t do some boring greeting of minor peers and lesser cabinet ministers, and the current crop of royal health woes – make one thing impossible to ignore: Buckingham Palace’s working royal ranks are so stretched and so thin they are precariously close to breaking point.
With the King still receiving weekly cancer treatment, Kate, the Princess of Wales making a very gradual return after a “brutal” year (as Prince William put it) and months of chemotherapy, and the Queen having now been down for the count for six weeks, we are a few dodgy prawn vol-au-vents or an errant sneeze away from a full blown disaster.
As it was, the royal showing at the Qatari dinner was all a bit anaemic given the painful lack of a tiara-ed and frocked-up Kate. The closest thing to any sort of fashion moment came when Victoria Beckham turned up with husband David (as he continues to press his case for a knighthood) dressed like a goth Quaker and conservative leader Kemi Badenoch wearing a silky number Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t have been caught dead in.
A blunt stocktake: The representatives who the Palace did manage to wheel in amounted to two septuagenarians with only moderate public support, a princess fresh in from doing the horses wearing a puffy-sleeved 80s two piece and a prince who is starting to look a little midlife-crisisy around the gills. (Though that might just have to do with the very in-between stage his beard is at).
It all just seems a bit of a dry, stale biscuit of a thing.
This version of the royal family will do in a pinch, but Princess Anne in a recycled, tired bit of 1985 muslin and the 78-year-old Duchess of Gloucester wearing all of her pearls is hardly going to do much wowing now, is it?
Which brings us to the two elephants in the room.
The prospect of any sort of real discussion about Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex staging any sort of meaningful comeback into the royal fold is so distant you can’t even see it if you squint.
But the sheer ludicrous fantasy of even seriously contemplating a Sussex return does not negate the fact that, all these years on, Crown Inc is suffering along with vastly depleted and wan-looking ranks and is pretty much out of options, choices and possibilities about how to deal with this.
This year, briefly, it did look like there might be some movement on this front.
The arrival of nearly all the royal cousins at a Buckingham Palace garden party in May to support William gave immediate rise to speculation that the prince might call up his 30 and 40-something relatives to help swell the numbers, with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie particularly tipped to take on some sort of official role of sorts.
That clearly has not happened.
The York girls are an option that King Charles does not seem to have any interest in availing himself of, leaving him back at square one with empty palaces piling up and an untold number of patronages lacking a royal figurehead.
The cancer diagnoses of both His Majesty and Kate this year have only underscored, dramatically and painfully, how rickety the royal family really is when it comes to actual working members who can be officially sent off to represent the crown.
Aside from Charles, Camilla, William and Kate, the only other names on the list are Anne (pause to savour her wonder), Prince Edward and Sophie, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucster and the Duke of Kent – who turns 90 next year.
Hardworking and well intentioned they might all be – all present and correct to do their capital D Duty – but this is far from a vibrant, exciting bunch ready to inject the image of royalty with any sort of verve and pep.
Collectively, they look more like a minibus-load of well-bred sorts off on a Salisbury Cathedral tour or keen for a day out at Chatham high street.
The plain truth of the matter is that Megxit hobbled the House of Windsor and dealt it a painful blow from which it shows no signs of being able to come back from.
Three separate friends of Camilla’s shared their fears about the pressure and workload being put on her, speaking to the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes.
Said one: “People forget that Camilla never set out to be queen. She never signed up for the hamster wheel. She just happened to fall in love with a prince. She has risen to the demands of the job but she finds it exhausting”.
A second pal told Sykes of the Queen’s bout of pneumonia, “We are all extremely concerned that this happened” while a third said, “She was run down and vulnerable and she needs to be cared for as well”.
The pressure on her shows no sign of letting up.
At least there is some good news. After a couple of days of officially touring London, the Qatari visit has been labelled a nice and successful bit of soft diplomacy, which is particularly important when you realise the country’s sovereign wealth fund owns Harrods.
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
Originally published as ‘Brutal’: King Charles reaches breaking point
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