‘Very short notice’: Mystery as William suddenly replaces King Charles with ‘apparent urgency’
The King has just missed a hugely important gathering of world leaders – and Buckingham Palace is not answering questions.
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If there is one export the UK really has a monopoly on, it’s sleuths.
Sherlock Holmes. Miss Marple. Hercule Poirot (yes, he’s Belgian-born – but all his books are set in drawing rooms in Wiltshire or some such). Lord Peter Wimsey. Inspector Morse. Luther. Whoever all the interchangeable blokes are in Death in Paradise.
So send out the rallying cry. Call ‘em all in. Draft them up.
The mystery is only growing and answers are in short supply about why King Charles just skipped the biggest gathering of world leaders and heads of state in donkey’s years, which Prince William then “scrambled” to attend.
MORE: Prince Williams’ dodgy $1.5b property empire revealed
On Saturday, everyone who is anyone and has their own nuclear codes (or at least knows a guy who knows a guy who could get them) was in France for the grand, ceremonial re-
opening of the Notre Dame Cathedral, five years after fire tore through the landmark building and ruined a key pillar of the Parisian souvenir market.
Note, this ceremony was hardly an event that randomly popped up in one’s calendar, with the cathedral’s opening date having been announced back in February.
Thus come Saturday, Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports were probably clogged like bad drains with private jets and royal aircraft, a sort of bumper-to-bumper headache for the 0.00001 percenters.
So where, in all of this, was the UK’s head of state? The man whose entire job is to, erm, represent Britain on the international stage and to fly the flag with both hands, even in the stiffest winds?
I have no idea. As 35 world leaders gathered inside the cathedral, Charles failed to turn up.
Instead, both the BBC and the Telegraph have reported that William was “scrambled” to go to France for the event, with the latter also saying that “the details surrounding this hastily arranged diplomatic mission remain hazy”. Elsewhere, the paper reported on the “apparent urgency with which the Prince was dispatched”.
Because not only did the 42-year-old Dadcore prince go to the actual Notre Dame event, but he was also “scrambled at very short notice to woo” US President-elect Donald Trump during a 40-minute private meeting at the UK ambassador’s residence.
The optics of William getting to do some Parisian statesman peacocking (and a very admirable job he did too) while Charles has not been seen in public in five days are impossible to ignore.
The questions are only mounting here.
Was the “urgency” with which William was posted off to Paris only to do with Trump’s last-minute decision to attend, and therefore the opportunity for some gently, gently British soft diplomacy to make nice with the incoming president?
Unquestionably, there is a very particular secret sauce quality to the laying on of hands by royalty that deeply appeals to narcissistic, egoist leaders.
But even if we take the Trump meeting out of the equation, who was Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street planning on sending to Notre Dame?
And you have to wonder, had there ever been any sort of plan for someone with a title and a few commemorative stamps to their name to pootle along? It is inconceivable they had not tapped someone who ranks among the great and good to rep the land of warm beer and incipient Nigel Farage-flavoured nationalism in Paris.
The biggest question of all: What role might Charles’ health or his ongoing weekly cancer treatment have played in all of this?
When The Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes asked if these had been “factors in his non-appearance”, they did not respond.
However, others have suggested that the King’s no-show was because he and Camilla are purposefully laying low, both septuagenarians and less than sterling examples of hale and heartiness at the moment. (Camilla was off sick for much of November).
A friend of Their Majesties has told Sykes: “I think everyone is relieved he didn’t want to go off to Paris and stand in the cold for hours on end. They are very sensibly just keeping things quiet to preserve their health in the run-up to Christmas”.
All of this would be cause for slightly palpitating concern enough – but then we get to quite the eye-popper of an admission from none other than Charles’ stepson, Tom Parker Bowles. (Side note: He says that at Charles and Camilla’s wedding, “my sister and I went for a fag and heard [the late Queen’s] voice behind us saying ‘Are you lost?’”)
Tom has a cookbook to flog (Cooking And The Crown) and so has spoken to the Telegraph, revealing not only what was on the cards for the royal family for Christmas (“turkey and sprouts and church”) but that “mortality” was on his mind and that Charles and Camilla had been through “hell”.
Of his December 25 plans, Parker Bowles said: “My mum said ‘I’d love you to come [to Sandringham], I haven’t had Christmas with you for a long time’. It has been a hell of a two years for them. The older you get, the more conscious you become of mortality, especially with illnesses and the rest of it”.
Well, if ever there was a demonstration of British understatement, vòila. “The rest of it” being a King getting on with the business of Kinging while enduring 10 months of unspecified treatment for an unspecified form of cancer that even saw him fly back from Scotland weekly over the summer.
Today we remain as in the dark as we were in February, when the Palace shockingly announced that His Majesty had been diagnosed with the dreaded big C.
Crown Inc’s tendency towards opaqueness about royal health was exposed last week during the State visit to the UK by the Amir and Sheikha of Qatar. For weeks, the Palace had been saying that the Queen had pulled out of major events like Remembrance Sunday because she was suffering from a “chest infection” and a “nasty bug” – only for her to spill the beans entirely and to admit she had actually had pneumonia.
The silver lining in all of this is that William got a nice shiny opportunity to strut his international statesman stuff, meeting Trump even before the UK’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the King. What a lucky bloke.
Mr Trump is now the third world leader that the Prince of Wales has gotten to gladhand in the last month, having met with South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and the Amir of Qatar.
Or maybe all of this can be explained away as part of the King’s clever plan to not have to sit in the icy cold for hours so he can stay home next to the fire watching a Midsummer Murders rerun with a toasty hot toddy.
Your guess is as good as mine.
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 ‘Very short notice’: Mystery as William suddenly replaces King Charles with ‘apparent urgency’
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