‘Not well’: Reports spark fresh fears for King Charles’ health amid cancer battle

Two alarming new reports have sparked fresh fears about King Charles’ health as the 75-year-old monarch continues to battle cancer.

I’ve looked for years, but have never found an accurate number of how many so-called grace-and-favour homes the monarch has within his gift.

I’ve seen 140 and more than 200, figures that I’ve got no way of checking, lest King Charles one day let slip after a second postprandial brandy to some loose-lipped duke.

The point is, His Majesty has lots. Palaces and estates and grand homes and apartments aplenty to dispense at his will. So many houses that should he ever want, he could do an Oprah “And you get a house!” jamboree of extravagance.

Which is what makes his insistence on ferreting Prince Andrew, the Duke of York out of his palatial and vast Royal Lodge that much more curious.

Enter a new, dark hypothesis.

A new, dark hypothesis has emerged about Charles’ health. Picture: Jan Kruger/Getty Images

Richard Eden, the Daily Mail’s longtime diarist, has reported that those in the disgraced duke’s inner circle have raised the possibility of a grim scenario about why His Majesty might be trying to pry his brother out of his silk-lined drawing room and into a moving truck.

Eden writes: “Intriguingly, more than one friend of the Yorks has suggested the same theory to me as to why this eviction ‘campaign’ has begun: could it be that the King sees Royal Lodge as a potential future home for Queen Camilla, were she to outlive him?” (Who are these Andrew friends? I’m imagining claret-soused blokes who are of the firm opinion that putting women on banknotes is woke tosh).

Eden goes on: “Whatever the motivation, it seems bizarre to me that the King is stepping up pressure on his brother when he should be concentrating his attention on another former working royal: his younger son, Prince Harry”.

Ignoring the obvious, that the king has indeed already chucked his son, daughter-in-law Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex and the grandchildren he barely knows out of their UK home Frogmore Cottage, the “bizarre” part holds.

For the better part of two years now, since the death of the late Queen, there have been regular reports that the King wants Andrew out of the 31-room Royal Lodge and for him to move into the comparatively modest five-bedroom Frogmore Cottage.

Charles’ push to evict Prince Andrew from Royal Lodge has raised eyebrows. Picture: Justin Tallis/AFP

The optics of the disgraced former trade ambassador and worst advertisement for New York tourism in history occupying a primo bit of royal real estate are atrocious.

Andrew’s rejoinder appears to be, “LEASE!” given he has one with more than 50 years yet to run. The 63-year-old is not going to go gracefully and downsize into the cottagey night.

The end result is what has been described as a “siege”, with the latest salvo coming this week with a report that Charles will no longer pay the nearly $6 million that it costs to provide private security for his brother’s homes.

It’s also worth noting here who lived at Royal Lodge before Andrew – namely, his grandmother the Queen Mother who moved into the Lodge in 1952 after the death of her husband George V. (They had lived there before Edward VIII’s abdication too). The extensive estate pile has form as somewhere to house a widowed Queen.

But that is not the only discomfiting reading about the King, with a new report from the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes containing three slightly spooky words – a friend of Charles has told Sykes that His Majesty is dedicated to focusing on the job for “whatever time remains”.

See, the sovereign might have officially started his Balmoral holiday on Monday last week, but then on Tuesday he travelled to Southport where Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, were killed during a Taylor Swift dance class on July 29. The following day, His Majesty met with their bereaved families in London before reportedly undergoing his treatment for cancer. The next day, on Thursday, he is said to have choppered back to Balmoral.

Camilla is reportedly worried her husband is working too hard. Picture: Jane Barlow – WPA Pool/Getty Images

Which is to say, he has just done a lot of backwards and forwards, from one end of the UK to nearly the other and then back again, for a 75-year-old who has a serious illness. Queen Camilla, according to the Beast, is afraid her husband is “working too hard”.

That friend of Charles offered the Beast a different spin on his workload: “There is not really much point being king if you’re not going to act like a king … If he put his feet up at Balmoral and sat around feeling sorry for himself his morale would crumble and that’s what really matters. Whatever time remains to him will be spent doing the job to the best of his ability”.

Another source has told Sykes: “I think there has been a lot of positive spin about the king doing well, getting back to work and so on … He is not well. He looked frail in Southport on Tuesday in my opinion … he has lost a lot of weight and aged considerably”.

None of this makes for easy, breezy summery reading now does it?

The good news? Those Windsor (and Mountbatten) genes are pretty formidable stuff.

Though that also means that Andrew is likely to be around for another three decades or more. I’m sure nothing will go wrong at all. Not at all.

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 ‘Not well’: Reports spark fresh fears for King Charles’ health amid cancer battle