‘Shake up’: Hard truth about King Charles’ future after 10-month cancer battle

The King has kept up a brave face as he battles a mystery form of cancer – but now, questions are being asked about what his future really holds.

What will Buckingham Palace do on February 5, 2025?

Let it slip by, unnoticed, save for a wry, wistful pause? Maybe a courtier will momentarily stop by a window looking out over The Mall and melancholically remember a year ago on that horrible Monday when the royal world spun off its axis?

That was the day the Palace revealed that King Charles had cancer, ushering in a strange new normal, a horrible sort of limbo. Now 10 months on, here we still are. On the cusp of 2025, how much longer can this be sustained?

As 2024 closes out, the King will have been undergoing an unspecified form of treatment for an unspecified form of cancer for more than 10 months, or around 44 weeks. Even during His Majesty’s extended summer holidays in Scotland he still, weekly, was being treated.

When His Majesty’s cancer news initially broke in February, the Palace line was simple: He would begin treatment, but would still be working as tirelessly as physically possible from home, battling through official paperwork and whatnot but skipping public engagements for the time being.

Charles with Camilla at the London Clinic on January 29, days before announcing his cancer diagnosis. Picture: Daniel Leal/AFP

Then in April came the grand announcement that Charles had been given the go ahead to resume public duties, starting with a personal visit to a cancer centre. Did he supportively and tenderly hold other sufferers’ hands? He did.

Things looked on the up and up.

But since then, Crown Inc has been operating in a strange ambiguous place that is neither thither or yon, neither quite feast nor foul. Many outward appearances might look normal, but there are reminders of the painful reality of the fight he is still privately fighting. Ample rest time was built into the schedule before, during and after His Majesty’s Australian tour.

In April came the grand announcement that Charles had been given the go ahead to resume public duties. Picture: Stefan Rousseau/Pool/AFP

Look at pictures from a variety of public engagements in 2024 and you would not immediately clock that anything is wrong. King Charles visited troops, hosted State visits and spent 11 days in Sydney, Canberra and Samoa. He’s been hugged by the New Zealand women’s rugby team and donned a military uniform to visit a commando training centre and gone to the Gladiator II premiere and pretended to know who Paul Mescal was.

Charles has still managed to log around 320 engagements, according to the supremely knowledgeable Patricia Treble of Write Royalty, despite it all. (Though that is still around 200 engagements less than in a normal year).

Charles and Camilla in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on October 22. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

And yet the King has clearly aged, bearing evermore of a resemblance to his father Prince Philip. Maybe it’s the treatment, or maybe it’s the simple inevitability of advancing years, but the Charles of December 2024 is a man whose face bears the unmistakeable signs of the march of time. His hair is whiter, thinner, his eyes a bit rheumier.

How long can Charles be a mostly-in, but sometimes out King? Or is this His Majesty’s persistent reality? Maintaining a certain degree of pretending that everything is normal and why, yes, he would love to open a roundabout in Bradford.

How long can he keep this brave front up for?

Even with these questions remaining unanswered, the new year is already being flagged as bigger, better and more for Charles and Camilla.

In October, Their Majesties had barely stowed their carry-on luggage as they left Samoa before Palace sources were breathlessly briefing the UK press about what a spiffing “tonic” the trip had been for the King. In fact, things were so tickety-boo that courtiers were making plans to resume Charles’ usual roster of twice-yearly overseas tours.

The royals at the Siumu Village on October 26, 2024 in Apia, Samoa. Picture: Aaron Chown – Pool/Getty Images

Then, more details came out in November when a royal source told the Mirror’s Russell Myers that Charles was planning a 2025 official visit to Italy with his good lady wife and that he is intent on “making up for lost time”.

The sovereign “is raring to go and incredibly positive about making plans for the future”. Buona indeed.

(There had been some suggestion that Prince William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales might make just such a pasta-twirling, Pope-visiting trip before her own cancer diagnosis).

There was, however, a caveat: They would still need to get the green light and “sign off” from Charles’ doctors.

There had been some suggestion that William and Kate might make just such a trip before her own cancer diagnosis. Picture: Samir HusseinWireImage

Then in December, the Mirror’s Russell Myers broke the news that the King is understood to have accepted an invitation to go to Poland for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27.

The problem with all of these revelations is that they set expectations higher and higher while nothing has changed in terms of Charles’ health situation as has been communicated by the Palace.

Against all this tour optimism and talk of the “tonic” of tours, there are moments that remind us where things really stand.

The King is understood to have accepted an invitation to go to Poland for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27. Picture: Wojtek Radwanksi/AFP

In December, when more than 30 of the world’s heads of state went to Paris for the reopening ceremony of Notre Dame, the King was conspicuously absent, sending William instead.

The prince, during that trip, met with Donald Trump who then revealed of their private conversation: “I asked him about his father and his father is fighting very hard, and he loves his father and he loves his wife, so it was sad”.

Donald Trump meets Britain's Prince William on December 7 in Paris, France. Picture: Aaron Chown – Pool/Getty Images

Also in December, it did not go unnoticed when Camilla’s son Tom Parker Bowles gave an interview to the Telegraph and said of his mother and stepfather, “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”.

So, what will the new year bring? More of the same or will, a year on, some definitive good news break through?

On February 5 this year, the King cannot have failed to notice a strange quirk of fate or the universe or a higher power with a very twisted sense of the ironic.

Every year, his mother, the late Queen, would remain at Sandringham until February 6. It was on that date, in 1952, that her father King George VII died of lung cancer and she became Queen.

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.