How King Charles lost control of royal family in just 29 hours
Only 15 months after getting the top job, His Majesty King Charles is seemingly losing control of the British royal family.
When it comes to Kingly misfortune, it’s hard to beat Harold Godwinson, a man who managed to nab the throne, only for, first, the Danes to invade Englnd from the north (lead by the superbly named Harald Hardrada) and then second - hot on their Scandi heels - to have William of Normandy storm across the channel to have a crack too.
(Spoiler alert: William, aka the Conqueror, won.)
Harold might easily take out top spot when it comes to the bad luck stakes but now King Charles, Defender of the Signet Ring and boiled egg connoisseur, is coming in at a very strong second place this week.
Only 15 months after getting the top job, and amid a heavy roster of opening parliament and handing out MBEs to breakfast TV stars who raise money to beat eczema, His Majesty has lost control – and there’s not even a horned-helmet-wearing Sven or Magnus doing some berserking in sight.
This weekend, as the King energetically bangs the climate crisis drum in Dubai for Cop28, Buckingham Palace is under proverbial siege.
According to either a massive translation error or the most outrageous marketing campaign in history, a new book has outed the King and Kate, the Princess of Wales as the so-called “royal racists”.
This week, all it took was a matter of hours for all hell to break loose and for Buckingham Palace to be caught thoroughly on the hop*.
In fact, from the time that the first post on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) went up on the day the book went on sale in Europe, to Piers Morgan being the first to publicly name names was only a matter of about 29 hours – 29 hours for The Firm to go from sailing above the fray to looking so far out of their depth that they need floaties.
The cause: Omid “no pal of Meghan’s” Scobie and his latest bookEndgame: Inside The Royal Family And The Monarchy’s Fight For Survival, the title of which sounds more like an Xbox shoot-’em-up than a scholarly interrogation of the future of the crown.
Despite Scobie’s protestations that it’s “not ‘Harry and Meghan’s book’” and that Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex “have nothing to do with it,” it is oh-so-conveniently a book that does a hell of a lot to further the Sussex cause.
The royal family, we learn, are intolerant and trapped in the thrall of Fleet Street, while, wouldn’t you know it, the duke and duchess are the best thing to happen to the monarchy since someone twigged about that haemophilia gene.
(Harold might have had problems but then he never had to contend with the never-ending fallout of his son and daughter-in-law and their sudden yen to make light info-tainment and their own almond milk, far far away from the demands of royal servitude.)
Then things went from bad to “uh oh the Vikings are burning down York”-worse when the Dutch version of Endgame named Charles and Kate.
The backstory, in case you have just woken up from an induced coma: In 2021, Meghan told Oprah Winfrey that an unnamed member of the royal family had raised “concerns” about the Sussexes’ first baby’s skin colour, the identity of whom has been the most closely
guarded Palace secret besides the late Queen’s bingo habit.
While the English language edition of Scobie’s book shies away from naming names, hours after the book was released, a Dutch royal reporter named Rick Evers noticed that the version being sold in that country pulled no such punches, outing the two Windsors alleged to have had the “concerns”.
This is - as far as I know - only regarding the Dutch version, not the English one. It seems as if only the Dutch version has published the person's name who spoke about the skin color of the unborn child. Charles.
— Rick Evers (@RickEversRoyal) November 28, 2023
Translation attached. pic.twitter.com/lXMJJVjlO3
Spark met tinder and WHOOSH. Endgame went from being another hostile book, a pesky, ankle-yapper of a title, to having started a full on firestorm.
So to recap: we have a royal family having been buffeted by a highly damaging crisis after years of damaging crises. Do you think His Majesty, his courtiers and the Jack Russells might have learnt a thing or two? Do you think that the King knows by now that the emu approach of yore, that is, sticking One’s head in the sand, does not work?
Of course not.
How has the Palace reacted to this extraordinary mess? In short, about as well as putting Princess Michael of Kent in charge of a sensitivity training workshop.
In the last few days, Charles has relentlessly stuck to the script of ploughing on with matters at hand and ignoring the growing conflagration in the press and on social media.
This, to my mind, is not brave or stoic or dignified but plain old idiotic.
Of all the many, many accusations and charges levelled against the House of Windsor in recent years it is this one – of unconscious bias, of racial insensitivity, of dodging and weaving when it comes to the hard conversations about slavery – that is the most devastating to His Majesty and the monarchy.
The King might be a septuagenarian white man who has never brought a loaf of bread or washed his own socks, a man whose idea of a good time is a Cliff Richard record, a party pack of Ryvita and reorganising his downstairs Vermeers via height - which is to say, impossibly out of touch - but he is the sovereign. And as the holder of this office he is meant to serve as a unifying figure of nation; the human embodiment of the State.
And that State is one where just shy of 12 million people, according to the 2021 census, are from ethnic backgrounds, a percentage that is only growing.
One of the few, if only points of Scobie’s that I agree with is that the monarchy is currently losing the battle to sway younger Britons to the cause of monarchy, many of whom see it as a horrifying holdover from the age of pith helmets and the brutal white oppression of colonial lands (and the denuding of natural resources and wealth thereof).
The numbers make for grim reading should any courtiers want to look up form their latest copy of Horse & Hound. In 2011, days before the wedding of William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales, 59 per cent of 18-24-year-olds said they thought the UK should continue with a monarchy. As of August this year, that figure had fallen off a Dover cliff to hit 37 per cent.
In 2011, 50 per cent of this demographic thought the monarchy was “good for the country”; today that figure sits at 30 per cent.
(And let’s not overlook the Commonwealth here, a voluntary organisation over which Charles presides and which represents about one third of the world’s population, the vast majority of whom are people of colour.)
The King’s number one, top of the list, must-do job is to keep the institution alive and kicking and to do that he has to persuade the next generation, and the one after that, that the crown represents values and ideals worth backing.
And that is why, if His Majesty hopes that the Palace gift shop is still up and running and selling overpriced jam in several decades, he must engage genuinely with the question of Buckingham Palace and race.
That means, in some substantive and meaningful way, addressing the issue that Harry and Meghan have raised on this point. It means confronting the monarchy’s historical ties to the trans-Atlantic slave trade - and that means delegating someone to throw out half of Princess Michael’s offensive broach collection.
Charles’ silence this week reflects the degree to which he is at sea, the Palace seemingly fresh out of ideas about how to even begin to manage this unfolding disaster. The King is currently demonstrating a lack of leadership and strength right now as history and the world watches on.
Just imagine how badly His Majesty would do if he did ever have to face down some vikings or a Frenchman adamant the throne should be his.
And there’s one final important point to be made here, of a certain wry symmetry to be found in the fact that back in the 11th century, it was Harald who made Harold’s life hell.
In Spare, the Duke of Sussex’s memoir revealed his brother Prince William’s nickname for him: Harold. And they say history repeats itself. Sheesh.
*(The most hoppy moment a King has ever experienced in all of history? When Danish King Harald Bluetooth was, some believe, killed by an arrow fired into his bottom while he was relieving himself mid-battle.)
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.
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