Every weekday for most of this year, a car, often a state Bentley, drives King Charles out the gates of Clarence House to do something no British monarch has ever done before – be Cancer was treated With full knowledge of the public.
Only now, after the scene has been running for eight months, has it been revealed that Charles has made a shocking decision – stop receiving treatmentTemporarily, that is, he and Queen Camilla are set to fly to our neck of the southern woods this week for an 11-day tour.
But the fact that the king is willing to take such a step for his treatment (and that his doctors have given him permission) shows how far he is willing to go, and how hard he will fight to preserve the monarchy. doing.
And it’s a battle new details reveal it’s struggling to win.
Consider the three-minute, dimly lit, rustic Instagram idyll released by Kate, Princess of Wales, last month to announce this She had come to the end of her chemotherapy And what it can tell us is whether the king’s grip is loosening.
Starring in the presentation – the longest video ever released by her and her husband Prince William – were not only their three young children, but notably and extremely unusually, their parents Mike and Carole Middleton.
The playful tableau – the big smiles, the easy rapport – completely captured the most cliché-oblivious, warm and united family.
Just as obvious as Middleton’s inclusion was the exclusion of a single visible reference or nod to William’s father or the royal family.
Now Tom Sykes of The Daily Beast has revealed that Wells’ video “was not signed by the king.”
As the year has progressed, “executive power and influence are already coming William’s way.”
He writes: “Such a tongue-in-cheek escape shows that William and Kate have an intuitive understanding… of how power dynamics have changed since the king’s diagnosis.”
Meanwhile, Welles has finished his work and is preparing for his close-up, Charles is doing something else entirely – nothing. Or at least, conserving your energy.
The 75-year-old will usually increase his workload after the monarch’s traditional Scottish break in October. not this time.
“The fortnight before the royal tour has been deliberately kept light for Her Majesty. He will still go to meetings, do his paperwork and still come for treatment,” a source said. daily Mail,
“Australia is a big deal and he wants to be fit and fighting.”
Then it’s just a tour. Stages in New Zealand and Fiji have been canceled and a full rest day has already been scheduled into the final itinerary.
The 11-day journey, undertaken with the highest levels of luxury and comfort that requires conserving one’s energy for several weeks, tells us not just a story about a man facing a serious illness, but a Tells about a king who is trying very hard. Things together.
A source offered a very candid assessment of Charles to the Beast in late August, saying, “I think there’s been a lot of positive talk about the king doing well, getting back to work, etc. But You know, he has cancer. He is not well… You only have to look at the pictures from a year ago and it is obvious; he has lost a lot of weight and has aged a lot. “
And yet, the tour is going ahead, a sign of how much is riding on it.
On the surface, the itinerary for Their Majesties’ Down Under sortie makes for as exciting reading as Prince Edward’s Tesco receipt (how many packets of plain tea biscuits can a man eat?) on the day of a flamboyant Charles’s outing to the surf Her swimsuit and a patch of Australian sand, as the press dutifully snatches it, move far ahead of us. (If ever a body is made for radio…)
Her trunks will remain firmly in her Clarence House drawer.
Instead, what the king will be doing is bravely trying to maintain the status quo that the late queen did with ease for 70 years.
For decades, monarchies and a dwindling collection of territories like Australia, where we still have the king as our head of state, have existed in a kind of holding pattern. Respect for the late Queen and a certain nod to her distant, slightly maternal rule meant that apart from Malcolm Turnbull occasionally getting a little hot under the collar, republicanism was never on the agenda.
It always seemed as if his death would fire the starting gun on the dismemberment of those 14 territories away from the motherland and the possible dissolution of the Commonwealth, an organization whose purpose I am not entirely sure about. (Something to do with trade or corn subsidies or exchange of graduate engineering students?)
Still, it is in the interests of Charles and the monarchy to keep everyone united and everyone happy, so the “workaholic” is coming along even over the protests of his good lady wife.
Earlier a friend of Rani had told Animal: “She wants him to slow down, she’s afraid he’s working too hard, and that’s before you go on tour in Australia”.
You have to feel sorry for Charles: scorned by his son and heir, who is scrambling to make the most of the “shifted power dynamic” while trying to carry on his mother’s legacy for a little longer. Is fighting cancer bravely.
A question I’ve asked myself 1,001 times: Who would ever want their job? And he won’t even get a chance to go to the beach.
