King Charles Australian royal tour: Why Queen Camilla is his secret weapon

As the King and Queen get ready to visit Australia, this royal tour will be very different — thanks to the woman once dubbed ‘the most hated woman in Britain’.

It was the start of another royal tour of Australia, and the signs were not promising.

Princess Diana, 21, was on her first official overseas trip with her husband Prince Charles. It would be described by her well-sourced biographer Andrew Morton as a “terrifying baptism of fire”.

As is often with royal tours, this 1983 visit was aimed at repairing public opinion. The royals had flattened in the public imagination. Then prime minister Bob Hawke had argued on TV that the nation should be loosening its bonds to the monarchy.

But an odd thing happened. An unexpected charisma offensive would be unleashed, and it had almost nothing to do with the King-in-waiting.

At Uluru, as stinking hot as ever, Diana asked for a glass of water, breaking with tradition that royals should not express emotions in public. She seemed more like one of us than one of them.

Then Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana standing in front of Ayers Rock during their official royal tour in 1983. Picture: Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images

The young mum who had appeared “uneasy, even glum” in the opening images of the trip would bloom in the unflinching glare of the role. There was anxiety, and probably bulimia, but these were masked in the fawning of the Australian people.

Diana was easygoing and relatable, pleased to shake the at least 6000 hands estimated to have been thrust her way over the four weeks in Australia.

Mothers liked that she had bucked another tradition, and brought her baby son William along for the trip. Crowds complained when Charles, and not Diana, went to their side of the street. She was the main event who “won the heart of Australia” in a tour called “an unqualified success”.

The crowd was more enamoured with Diana then with Charles. Picture: Bryn Colton/Bob Thomas/Popperfoto via Getty Images

Diana later spoke of a “jealousy” from the media attention devoted to her, and not her husband, in what was interpreted, in both truth and the Netflix hit The Crown, as a starting point for the marriage fault lines ahead. Her tour was also said to short circuit Australia’s republican push.

This was more than 40 years ago, before the archaic institution, in large part because of Diana’s sudden death, got steamrolled by modernity, technology, and a growing cynicism for notions of mindless tradition.

Yet some things have not changed. Royal tours have almost always come to be about female royals (even with all the sideshows that Prince Philip liked to throw up).

This is as true of King Charles’ visit in 2024 as Queen Elizabeth’s first tour here in 1954.

Charles, at 75, is all grown up, married to a woman whom he loves. He is unlikely to express the same pinched expressions of 1983 if his now wife Camilla draws the photographers’ eye in the upcoming visits to Sydney and Canberra in coming days.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla will be visiting Australia soon. Picture: AFP

Charles’ 17th trip to Australia, this tour will be a slimmed down version for a slimmed down monarchy. Two doctors will accompany the king, who is pausing cancer treatment for the visit.

Charles and Camilla will attend events which reflect their interests.

At the Australian National Botanic Gardens, they will meet with staff and volunteers to ponder the impacts of climate change. Camilla will discuss family and domestic violence.

The crowds will be thinner than they once were. There will be walkabouts, though they are no longer called walkabouts, lest the term offend Indigenous communities.

King Charles is a natural of the meet and greet setting, a gracious and giving subject who has perfected his approach over six decades.

Photos of his 1966 sojourn at Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop campus will be re-tended as evidence of his great affection for Australia.

Yet Camilla is warmer of manner than her husband, faster to laugh, a weapon of gladhanding duties. Like Diana, who cast Camilla as the enemy in introducing her to the world, Camilla can seem more like us than them.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla are here in Australia again. Picture: Getty

After Queen Elizabeth’s death in 2022, Camilla toured Britain with a broken toe - no complaints. At the time, Charles’ former communications secretary Julian Payne wrote about Camilla’s power.

“It is this innate curiosity and interest in people that makes her such an asset to the institution,” he wrote.

Camilla, he concluded, brought fun, which may explain the scene of her dancing with Ghana’s president, and Charles dancing with the first lady, in oft-replayed footage of a 2018 tour.

The Australia tour that same year was more fraught. Tours are memorable only when something does not go to plan. This one was meant to be like all the others; confected programs in trifles and fripperies.

Britain's King Charles III and Britain's Queen Camilla arrive to meet members of the Welsh Parliament during a visit to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Senedd, in Cardiff in July. Picture: Getty

Camilla didn’t stay long enough, went one complaint. The price tag of the trip was tallied up, as if to show that Australians were being ripped off.

Camilla was castigated for appearing to be “bored” by the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games which, according to most non-royal observers, was very boring.

At the time, Charles’ sons were both popular, at least more so than their father. They still liked each other. Questions abounded about republicanism (royal tours typically dampen the push, at least briefly). Royal watchers debated the appropriate title for Camilla once Charles assumed the throne.

In happier times at the Invictus Games Opening Ceremony on September 10, 2014 in London, England. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Camilla, now 77, was coming off a very low base. When Diana, who called her “the rottweiler” and the third person in her marriage, died in 1997, Camilla apparently had bread rolls thrown at her in a supermarket. She was labelled the “most hated woman in Britain”.

Her strengths contrasted with the glamorous vulnerability of Diana. They would take years to surface in public life.

“The public doesn’t appreciate her and probably never will,” a palace source told the Sunday Times in 2018.

Arthur Edwards is the veteran royal photographer for Britain’s Sun who has long been privy to the off-camera quirks of the family.

In 2018, he told News Corp that “I love” Camilla.

“She’s a fabulous person,” he said. “She’s a hard working lady. She’s a very compassionate, caring lady … she’s got the greatest sense of humour in the world.”

A former Buckingham Palace press secretary Dickie Arbiter put it down to her style. She doesn’t try too hard to convince people of her charms, he told News Corp.

“She’s got the common tact and the ability to talk to people of any background,” he said.

“She’s just Camilla as Camilla has always been.”