Grim new claim amid King Charles’ cancer battle
More than a year after it was revealed that King Charles has cancer, a shocking new development has just come out.
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On Wednesday the shortlist of designs for the $95 million memorial to Queen Elizabeth that will be built in St James’s Park in London were unveiled.
They range from the subtle (a nice bit of bridge) to the prosaic (Her late Majesty done in bronze astride a pony) to the phantasmagorial and looking like something out of Wendy from Peter Pan’s sketch pad after she’d tried ayahuasca.
Construction is not slated to begin until 2027. Depending on how long it takes to build, King Charles, according to a shocking new revelation, might not be alive to open it.
Charles has cancer, we all know that.
In January 2024 he went into hospital for what was meant to be a routine treatment for an enlarged prostate only for his doctors to discover that the King also has cancer, the exact type of which has never been disclosed by Buckingham Palace.
MORE: Charles’ wild $6m power move to please Camilla
Since then, for the last 15 months, he has received weekly treatment, flying back to London via helicopter at times to continue whatever regimen his medical team has him on.
In April he was briefly hospitalised after experiencing side effects.
That’s it. That is all that has been made known by the Palace about the 76-year-old’s condition, a collection of details so slim, so few they could be jotted down on half Post It note with space left over.
Now, highly respected royal correspondent Tom Sykes, The Daily Beast’s European Editor-at-Large, has made a stunning new assertion during an interview.
The King, Sykes told the Beast impresario Joanna Coles, might only have “three or four years” to live.
Sykes said while appearing on the Beast’s podcast: “The reality is that everybody knows that succession plans are gearing up, no one is really expecting Charles to live, you know, more than three or four years.
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“And I mean that in the context of that when he came to the throne people definitely felt he could live ‘til he was the age of his mother [who died at 96] or his father who was 99.
“So people definitely thought it was 20 years of the King Charles era and I think people much more now think it is now going to be a five, six year reign, something like that.”
Sykes’ claim comes just days after the King’s own son Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex made the startling admission during his bombshell BBC interview that he is in the dark about his father’s health.
“I don’t know how much longer my father has,” the Duke said.
Charles himself has made comments that have not gone unnoticed. Only last month at Easter, when a well wisher waiting outside St George’s Chapel told him that he looked well, the King replied, “You are very kind, it’s all smoke and mirrors.”
In December, asked during an east London outing about how he was, His Majesty joked, “I’m still alive.”
And before that, in October on the last day of his and Queen Camilla’s tour of Australia and the South Pacific, he told a crowd in Samoa that he ‘hoped’ “I survive long enough to come back again and see you.”
The implications of Sykes’ new podcast claim about the King, coming only a few years after Queen Elizabeth’s death, and looking ahead are deeply sobering.
If he is correct, that could see King William V and Queen Catherine being crowned as early as 2028.
(In October last year, Sykes reported that Charles’ announcement he had cancer had “fired the starting pistol on what courtiers euphemistically term the ‘change of reign.’ The planning and positioning for the reign of King William V, necessarily and behind the scenes, began”.)
For now William and Kate, who are obviously the Prince and Princess of Wales, it would represent a catapulting into the top jobs decades before they might have hoped to assume such responsibility and while their children are still comparatively young and still at school.
The pressure, the workload, and the global travel expected of them would increase steeply and immediately, with Kate currently continuing on her own journey to recovery after her cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy last year.
For the prince and princess, who have fiercely fought to create some simulacrum of normality for their three children, it would surely have to represent a profound and immediate jolt to their happy status quo.
Only at Easter did they skip attending the Easter service at Windsor Inc to instead enjoy family time at their Norfolk estate Anmer Hall.
Whenever the day comes that William does become King, occasionally playing truant like this will not be an option.
The Head of the Church of England can’t skip one, if not the, holiest days of the Christian calendar to enjoy ruddy-faced mucking about in a flat cap with his kids.
Courtiers, according to The Times’ Kate Mansey, “have come to accept that they are likely to be asked to fill any spare hours in the monarch’s diary.
“Palace sources say that the King’s aides are now used to ‘filling any gaps’ with visits to community centres and other engagements.”
Since Charles returned to public engagements in April last year, the Palace’s messaging has been steadfast - the King is focused on and busy doing his job of Kinging.
Royal aides have previously told the Telegraph that His Majesty’s treatment is “moving in a positive direction” and they have spoken of “the very encouraging status quo”.
What seems undeniable is the King’s determination to, as he told cancer patients in Belfast in March quoting Winston Churchill,“keep buggering on!”
In March, The Times’ Kate Mansey reported that “Courtiers have come to accept that they are likely to be asked to fill any spare hours in the monarch’s diary.
Palace sources say that the King’s aides are now used to ‘filling any gaps’ with visits to community centres and other engagements.”
There is a certain symmetry here with Monday marking the second anniversary of Charles’ coronation at Westminster Abbey.
Over two hours the Sovereign underwent the ancient ritual of being dabbed with holy oil flown in from Jerusalem and swearing the same oath that British monarch’s have been making since about the time of Edgar in the tenth century.
You can’t get more symbolically freighted than that - the British monarchy stands for continuity, duty and public service.
The Crown has, for more than a millennium now, kept buggering on and so it shall yet.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Grim new claim amid King Charles’ cancer battle
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