Startling before and after Charles photo reveals extent of King’s health battle
More than six months after King Charles revealed his cancer diagnosis, the palace can no longer hide the toll his health battle is taking.
You’d be hard pressed to find a photo of King Charles looking happier than one taken on a sunny Friday last September.
There His Majesty was, quaffing a glass of organic red wine while on the regal job in postcard-perfect Bordeaux alongside Queen Camilla.
They were coming to the end of a belter of a first foreign tour, and Parisians had actually stood on the city’s pavements and cheered them on.
And then last week came another photo, the King again looking pleased as heavily-laced punch, this time breaking his summer holiday to make enthusiastic noises while looking at prize-winning turnips at the Aberdeen horticultural show.
The turnip part is not the problem (it never is), nor the kilt and the world being treated to the sight of a monarch’s knobbly knees on proud display. But hold these two images – from Bordeaux and Aberdeen – up side-by-side, and the change in Charles’ appearance is undeniable.
Oh, it’s wonderful that his smile is still as wide, that his eyes still light up in the same fashion when he’s out and about on manoeuvres and when he’s meeting the hoi and the polloi. His abundant joy in doing the job he is doing is clear.
But enthusiasm and a well tailored blazer can only get you so far. It’s time to face facts: the King does not look well.
His hair is considerably whiter, there is something different about his skin and he appears noticeably older. In fact, in the photos from Aberdeen, His Majesty has started alarmingly resembling his late father Prince Philip, who only died several short years ago at the age of 99.
It’s now nearly seven months since His Majesty blew the socks off the world – and newspaper font sizes out – on February 5 by announcing he has cancer.
It was news that Buckingham Palace took the highly unusual step of actually revealing, unclenching their royally retentive approach towards information-sharing. It was a decision taken by the King, the statement said, with “the hope” that the transparency might “help” people the world over “who are affected by cancer”.
Since then, Crown Inc has adopted a less Soviet approach to public disclosure about the King’s health than the one the late Queen stuck to. Back in 2021 and 2022, despite something clearly being very wrong, as her frame shrank and she lost a significant amount of weight, the Palace never once even admitted she was in need of as much as a band aid or a junior aspirin.
It’s easy to forget given how much has happened, but Her late Majesty’s admission to hospital overnight in October 2021 only came after The Sun broke the news. It was cloak plus dagger to the extreme.
It was only several months after her death that, in late 2022, writer Gyles Brandreth (and good friend of Camilla) revealed that the late Queen had actually been battling myeloma, a form of bone marrow cancer. While this has never been officially confirmed, nor have they pushed back in any way, which is telling.
Charles has adopted a wholly different approach to talking about his health. First in January there was his initial, unusually frank admission he was going in for surgery for an enlarged prostate. (It was during this procedure his doctors discovered he has cancer). Then came the horrible February reveal.
Later that same month, the Palace released a video showing the King reading some of the more than 7000 get well cards he’d been sent in the space of a couple of weeks and he revealed to former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that some of the touching messages had reduced him to tears. (Thus making him the first King in the last 957 years to admit to having functioning tear ducts).
Another update came in April when it was announced that the King would return to public-facing duties because his doctors were “very encouraged” by the progress of his treatment.
What is indisputable is that the King has been much more direct about his health than his mother, but the question that these Aberdeen photos demand is, is it enough?
The struggle that His Majesty’s aides face now is how the hell to navigate what precisely and how they share information about the King’s health. How to find a midway between the public’s right to know, and the King’s right to privacy.
Because while the Palace has certainly been markedly more open about His Majesty’s health, let’s not get too excited. How much has really changed since the late Queen’s reign? A charming Instagram video here and there hardly constitutes a brave new world of real upfrontness. Really, some smart PR aside, the world remains as in the dark today as we were on February 5 about what exactly Charles is facing.
But that’s not to say for a moment that complete cards-on-the-table is the right way to go either. I’m not, for a second, suggesting that the King must share his full diagnosis, doctors’ notes and exact treatment plan with the Press Association while also making it publicly available to download in PDF form.
But then we get photos like the ones of the King at Aberdeen with the toll of his health battle clearly visible. Can the Palace continue to expect to still play by the late Queen’s rules in an age when the boundaries between the personal and the public have dissolved and where sharing journeys and truths and every twinge is now expected?
The late Queen enjoyed a free pass of sorts on this front, what with her having been born nearly a century ago. She was a remnant of a different world with different values that has long since disappeared like Bakelite telephones and phrenology.
In 2024, the challenge that Charles’ aides face is trying to strike some sort of balance between his very human need for privacy and dignity and the demands of the throne.
Where does public ownership of a King end and the rights of the actual man start?
Sovereigns are people too, but they are also not quite.
And while his courtiers puzzle this out, a job I do not envy, you have to hand it to Charles.
Even at 75, even with cancer, even while interrupting his summer holiday to review trestle tables of swedes, he’s a man who delights in his day job, even when it involves beetroots rather than Bordeaux.
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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