New book claims King Charles has ‘faced a cancer scare before’ this year’s horror diagnosis

As King Charles continues his battle with cancer, a new book has made a bombshell claim about the monarch’s health.

There’s a saying in journalism – don’t bury the lede. But sometimes, big news slips by largely unnoticed. After all, it’s not like things are exactly quiet on the world events front right now.

News like a major development concerning King Charles, who marked his 76th birthday on Thursday with some no doubt nut-based, low-sugar crime against baking, while facing his ongoing battle against cancer.

It is now nearly 10 months since the world endured the almighty shock of learning the monarch has the dreaded disease – but now, a new bombshell claim has cast his health crisis in a new light.

His Majesty has reportedly “faced a cancer scare before”.

Well now, if that’s not a record-scratch moment, I don’t know what is.

This news comes to us via highly regarded biographer Robert Hardman, who has just released an updated version of his book Charles III, New King, New Court. Hardman learnt, from “people close to him both now and in the past” that His Majesty “had faced a cancer scare before”, according to the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes.

I know the questions you are probably asking, because I am too – when? What was it? And just how serious are we talking? A dodgy mole that needed whipping off or something more worrisome?

Details are precisely non-existent, but Hardman’s clanger would seem to undermine the line that Buckingham Palace has been adopting that they are operating much more of an open-book approach regarding the monarch’s health than that of his late mother’s reign.

Even so, as Hardman pointed out to the Beast, “There was a decision not to be too heavy-handed about privacy. When [Charles] came to London for treatment, he chose to travel in a state car so people could see him”.

King Charles III has reportedly had a cancer scare before. Picture: Chris J Ratcliffe/Pool/AFP

(Still, there is also an argument to be made that him willingly waving at the masses from the back of the State Bentley as he heads off could have more to do with the impossibility of masking the King’s treatment regimen for months on end than just a new, open, sharing, caring approach to how much information is made public).

No matter what form this “cancer scare” might have taken, Hardman offers fresh insight into what was playing out behind the Palace gates during what is an unfortunately historic year, with the “big shock” that not only the King but Kate the Princess of Wales were both battling the big C.

“The royal household was aware of what was going on before the public. There was a sense of fragility – things had been going well, and then suddenly they were hit by this news,” he has said.

“But he was very matter of fact about it, with no panic.”

Now, just to make myself truly guilty of burying the second lead, here comes some very good news courtesy of Hardman, who has offered us the strongest ray of hope yet about the King’s future.

“The prognosis is that he will get through this, and he’s getting better,” he has told the Beast. “Of course, we know cancer can recur, but they caught it early.”

Luckily, the King’s cancer was caught early. Picture: Jordan Pettitt – WPA Pool/Getty Images

(Also in the buoying department, it was only earlier this week that the Telegraph reported that His Majesty and the princess “have moved into the next phase of their cancer journeys”).

While Kate announced back in September that she had completed her chemotherapy, the King is still undergoing weekly treatment, even travelling back from Scotland during his long summer holidays for it.

Whoever knows what this “cancer scare” might have meant in truth (see: Dodgy mole, above) are obviously not saying, but the situation highlights how little is actually known about royal health. (Buckingham Palace has never confirmed, though crucially never denied, that the late Queen died of a rare form of bone marrow cancer).

Kate’s cancer was discovered after she had planned abdominal surgery in January, the exact nature of which has remained a closely-guarded secret.

Neither the sort of cancer the King and the princess have are known and it seems unlikely that we will anytime soon.

It has been a tough year for the royals, with the Princess of Wales also battling cancer. Picture: Handout/BBC Studios/AFP

Even before this year’s health crisis, there have been questions asked about the famed pot plant-nattering royal’s wellbeing – to wit, his famed sausagey fingers.

(Before I’m accused of digit-shaming the King, even he himself jokes about his very red, swollen-looking appendages. In last year’s BBC doco about the preparations for his coronation, Charles at one point reassures a clumsy William, “You haven’t got sausage fingers like mine”).

Striking the line between protecting the very human need for some privacy of members of Crown Inc and the public interest in their bodies is a hard line to walk.

Hardman also shared one final, truly touching new detail about the King – one very moving thing he does every December.

“Every Christmas, before going to his family Christmas, he visits a hospice. He probably has more expertise in cancer than most health ministers”.

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