Slate has half a dozen articles devoted to him on its front page alone. One that caught my interest was Imogen West-Knights‘ “King Charles Has a Problem Queen Elizabeth Never Had. He Did It to Himself.” There’s quite a bit of rehashing of the various scandals and weirdnesses Charles has manifested over the years but this insight was useful:
Charles is, by default really, the most modern king the U.K. will have had. He’ll be the first monarch to have been to school. He’ll be the first monarch whose life has been subject to tabloid scrutiny, whose failures and foibles are already well known to the public before he ascends the throne. Elizabeth II had an appeal that extended beyond people who would consider themselves royalists—she was a fixture in national life, thought of by many as a sort of benign grandmotherly figure and, based on the very little information people ever got about her, quite widely liked in the U.K., as monarchs go. She intentionally kept her private self hidden. Unlike Charles, she almost never gave a televised interview, and although she agreed to let a BBC crew chart the lives of the royal family in 1968, she reportedly felt when the subsequent documentary came out that it had opened too wide a window on the inner lives of the royals. She is said to have personally had it scrubbed nearly out of existence, other than in a few physical archive locations. By contrast, if you want to, it’s all too easy to find out perhaps too much about the king’s intimate personal history via, for example, Googling the words “Prince Charles” and “tampon” together.
Charles won’t be allowed to express his opinions on things anymore, but in some ways that doesn’t matter. It’s too late. We already know them. And his conduct before taking the throne will probably dictate his popularity during his reign more than anything else. Opinion polls have consistently shown him to be less popular than Queen Elizabeth II, or his son Prince William. Anti-monarchist protests are now a fixture at his public events. He’s been egged. Charles III may be a more modern monarch than his mother was, but he will be ruling over a very different country than the one she looked out on at her coronation in 1953—and the judgment of his reign has been underway for most of his lifetime.
The monarchy is an anachronism, seemingly kept alive mostly for its value as a tourist attraction. Charles’ mother lived an extraordinarily long time and was, in human terms, an incredibly strange figure. It’s truly weird to be simultaneously among the most famous people in the world and essentially unknown. She had weekly audiences with every prime minister from Churchill through Truss and yet had to maintain the illusion she had no political opinions.
As a theoretical matter, it was Charles’ duty as the heir apparent to maintain a similar illusion. But I can’t imagine the self-discipline it would take for an intelligent, well-educated man to go through his first seven decades expressing no opinions. Regardless, Charles certainly didn’t possess it.
As King, I suspect he’ll do his duty and stay out of politics. But, as West-Knights notes, the prime minister will bloody well know what he thinks because he’s been a public figure for so long.
