King Charles’ sad loss to Kate Middleton
As King Charles and the Princess of Wales both fight cancer, one thing sharply divides the increasingly close duo.
COMMENT
If I asked you to pick five adjectives to describe King Charles, a man who famously natters to primroses, enjoys reading about Sufi mysticism and thought his daubing at watercolours was as valuable as the work of Lucian Freud, what would you choose?
I’m guessing some might include cold fish, stiff-as-a-board, oddbod, ineffectual, hug-shunner, pocket square-fancier, lifelong intern, and so emotionally retentive even Lucian’s grandpa Sigmund would have given up?
None of the words most people would associate with the King would be ‘touchy-feely paternal figure who is not only able, but eagerly willing to offer heartfelt succour and support to family members at a time of crisis’.
And yet there the King was in late March, putting out a statement after daughter-in-law Kate, the Princess of Wales, revealed she has cancer that was so deeply personal I wouldn’t be surprised if the letterhead he drafted it on was blotchy from a few leaky, regal tears and a dripping nose.
However, after all that gushing, new polling has revealed that the public’s reaction to the princess’s diagnosis and that to the King’s news that he too has cancer are distinctly at odds.
While the UK has essentially muttered a collective ‘pity’ about Charles’s health woes, for Kate the nation has instead rallied around her to a degree such that if she needed a bone-marrow transplant the jostling, eager queue to donate would be longer than for a Harvey Nicks sale.
Let’s get a tad swotty, huh?
On New Year’s Eve 2023, as Charles lifted a glass of Courvoisier to Queen Camilla and the dogs, all wearing party hats, as he made the downstairs staff listen to him sing Auld Lang Syne, 61 per cent of Brits had a favourable view of His Majesty.
Then in early February, the King revealed to the world that his medical team (which I’m imagining consists of a pack of half-moon glasses-wearing Oxbridge men who like to defensively talk about when you could still open a door for a woman) had discovered he had cancer during surgery for an enlarged prostate.
After that news broke, the King’s favourability figure went up to 66 per cent. So a very minor increase, but as survey group YouGov’s head of data journalism Matthew Smith put it, there was “No evidence of ‘rally round the flag’ sentiment” after Charles’s news.
Now, as of April, that had dipped to 63 per cent.
Then we have Kate. On her New Year’s Eve, which probably saw her ringing in 2024 still sipping on the same warmed, flat glass of Waitrose prosecco Prince William had poured for her at 8pm (last of the great ravers is our Kate), her favourability was at 70 per cent.
As of April, that figure is now at 76 per cent.
Kate vastly outstripping Charles in popularity and support during this real crisis point for Crown Inc represents an upsetting of what is meant to be the natural order of things and the etched-in-Cornish-granite hierarchy of things.
The picture gets even worse for the King when we look a bit further back.
The only brief moment that the princess has dipped below the 70 per cent threshold since marrying William and willingly signing on a for a lifetime of mandatory attendance at the Chelsea Flower Show was in March 2020 in the wake of Prince Harry and Meghan the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s final series of official engagements, when she hit 69 per cent.
On the other side of the aisle, the acme of the King’s support came in the days after the late Queen’s death in 2022 when that figure hit 70 per cent.
Translation: Kate’s worst number (69 per cent) is still basically the same as Charles’s best number (70 per cent).
You don’t need a Masters in monarchy to get my point here.
What 13 years worth of numbers show is that Kate clearly has a connection with the public that His Majesty – despite his decades of tireless plugging away and his King’s Trust having helped more than one million young people find jobs and education – has failed to ever achieve.
It’s a curious replay of the same dynamic that existed with Diana, Princess of Wales who magnetically drew people to her and charmed the masses like some spell-weaving good witch of the West End.
She turned up on the royal scene, bought some pie-frill collared shirts, made those doe-eyes at a few cameras and the world swooned. Meanwhile, Charles could have personally saved a drowning puppy and cured leprosy and he would only have gotten a room temperature response.
The difference in 2024 is that this time around, the King is not a 30-something emotionally stunted man-child who’s permanently stroppy that the teenage wife he plucked out of Sloane Square and dumped on a rope line turned out to be preternaturally gifted at just that.
Luckily, by all accounts, Charles not only likes Kate but can see what a huge boon she is for the monarchy.
By all accounts, the pair’s health battles have only strengthened their bond, with The Sun recently reporting that they’d had an “emotional” lunch at Windsor Castle only hours before the princess’s cancer video came out.
“The King has always had a close, warm and unique relationship with the princess,” a source close to Charles told the Times last month. “She has a great love and respect for him and his position. When they were in hospital together there was a lot of toddling down the corridor to spend time with her. He has been encouraging and supporting her throughout.”
Yet none of this changes the fact that the elephant in the Clarence House downstairs drawing room is that the King remains a far lesser figure in the hearts and minds of his subjects than a gal who pre-marriage had a charity roller disco on her CV.
He has the blood of centuries of monarchs, sovereigns and princesses traded about Europe like lace-covered chattel; she once had a part-time job taking photos of Thomas the Tank Engine streamers for her mother’s business (RIP Party Pieces).
Charles and Kate might have all the love and care in the world for one another and a two-person WhatsApp chat that’s all Cheryl Strayed quotes and heart emojis, but their job, at the end of the day, is to keep the monarchy going and one of them is currently making a much better fist of it than the other.
(Support for the monarchy is going in one direction, with the UK’s National Centre for Social Research finding last year that it was at an all-time low with close to half, 45 per cent, of respondents saying the monarchy should be abolished or was not important.)
Right now, the King and the Princess of Wales might be bonding up a storm but step outside the palace gates and all bets are off.
Still, I am personally very happy that new-flavour Charles, a man who no longer needs to wear a mood ring to work out what he’s feeling, is here. Long may the emo King reign.
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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