Prince Harry accused the Queen Consort, Camilla, of leaking a private conversation between William, Camilla and himself to the media.
OPINION:
What are the key requirements of working HRHs?
The ability to juggle a weak cup of tea while chatting to Rotary members? The savvy to know exactly what to say to a nervous, gently perspiring mayor done up in their full gold chain regalia in some small backwater? The fortitude to not chortle and snort when forced to help name a white rhino, meet with a native oyster initiative or to take part in a spin class in a suit? (King Charles and Prince William respectively – and in the last week.)
Yes, yes and yes.
But today poor King Charles has proven that he, having taken the throne nearly six months ago to the day, has had to learn a new skill and fast.
On Tuesday, UK time, the King and his wife Queen Camilla headed 100km northeast of London to Colchester where they were celebrating the former ancient Roman outpost officially becoming a city. The visit should have made minor headlines at best – a pensioner charmed here, a zoo visited there.
Instead Charles and Camilla were heckled by a small but loud group of people from the group Republic – and the incident was caught on video. The protesters carried signs saying, “Not our King” and shouted, “Why are you wasting our money?” “Why are you defending Andrew?” and “Come and talk to your critics, sir!”
It was hardly a massive outpouring of antimonarchy sentiment; it’s not exactly time for the King and Queen to race back to Clarence House to start packing up their better Rembrandts and preparing to set sail to Brazil. And we are certainly not about to see a guillotine being erected on the Buckingham Palace forecourt.
However, this appears to be the largest such incident that the new King and Queen have faced after a series of protests at engagements in recent months.
Moreover, this vocal show of republican sentiment is something that is entirely new to the royal field and something that never occurred during the late Queen’s reign. (Well, a bloke fired at the Queen during 1981′s Trooping the Colour as she rode down the Mall but they were blanks and his motivation was fame, so…)
In September, during Charles’ accession proclamation in Edinburgh, a woman was arrested for holding a sign saying: “F**k imperialism. Abolish monarchy.” And a man was arrested in Oxford after asking, “Who elected him?” at the county proclamation ceremony.
(There was also the guy who shouted, “Andrew, you’re a sick old man,” as the Duke of York walked behind the late Queen’s coffin, but we’d all kinda like to yell that, right?)
Around the same time, a barrister was warned by police that he risked arrest if he wrote “not my King” on a placard.
The video he recorded of the encounter has been viewed more than 1.5 million times on Twitter.
The septuagenarian has also had eggs hurled at him on two occasions late last year, though the offending oeufs didn’t hit their target. (Bet Charles’ under valet was relieved not to have to work out how to get egg yolk out of a Turnbull & Asser shirt.)
In February, he and Camilla visited Brick Lane in London’s East End where a solo protester waved a black flag and told The Times: “I represent people who did not vote for him.”
A day later, a protester was detained when William and wife Kate, the Princess of Wales visited Cornwall. Later, the man told the Telegraph: “It’s the 21st century and we don’t need a monarchy anymore. It’s f***ing ridiculous.”
None of these exactly represent a groundswell of republican sentiment, a nation just itching to dump the monarchy and to turn Buckingham Palace into the world’s biggest Airbnb. But, a very clear trend is emerging, with the royal family, when appearing in public, now regularly coming face-to-face with Brits opposed to the monarchy.
This period is meant to be His Majesty’s honeymoon period with the British public, a time when their curiosity about the new bloke in charge, combined with lingering, leftover affection for his ever-dutiful, hardworking mum, tides him over and sees the people give him the benefit of the doubt.
King Charles and Queen Camilla greet people as they visit Colchester Castle in Colchester. Photo / AP
The family business of Monarchy Inc. is at a particularly precarious point right now.
What these protesters represent are small fault lines in the monarchy’s facade. They might not exactly be future-treating now, but they could well be.
Currently, the King faces a fractured Britain, riven by Brexit, having just scraped through the “winter of discontent”, and now dealing with an ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
Hopefully Charles has stayed away from reading the polling out this week while he enjoys his morning muesli and copy of Heat magazine. (I imagine Camilla is more of a DeuxMoi gal when it comes to getting the hot goss.)
All of the senior members of the royal family have experienced double digit drops in their net favourability since November 30 last year.
Net favourability of royal family members in Great Britain (1 March):
Kate Middleton +52% (-11) Prince William +49% (-12) King Charles III +27% (-19) Queen Camilla +1% (-24) Prince Harry -22% (-37) Meghan Markle -33% (-31) Prince Andrew -53% (-22)
— Redfield & Wilton Strategies (@RedfieldWilton) March 7, 2023
The King’s net favourability has fallen 19 per cent while the Queen’s has fallen 24 per cent. So too did William and Kate show declines of 12 and 11 per cent respectively.
The problem for the King is that his accession has unfortunately coincided with the unprecedented WikiLeaks-level of disclosures and dirty laundry-dumping engineered by Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
The grim cherry on top of this cake is that His Majesty’s own son Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, has spent the past few months targeting the royal family via his reported seven-figure and eight-figure content deals. (Talk about cash-for-comment …)
Charles, his relatives and the monarchy have only just barely squeaked through the Sussexes’ rat-a-tat-tat of barbs and accusations, with “barely” being the operative word there.
On May 6, when the Archbishop of Canterbury anoints the 74-year-old with holy oil, a practice that can be traced back to times of the Old Testament (when King Solomon was anointed), no sovereign will have ever preceded him about whom we know so much personal detail – and so much of which is negative.
Thanks to Harry’s seeming single-minded urgency to unload his every hurt feeling and sad twinge out on the public (generally with a fat pay packet attached) the world has never before had a British king whose purported inadequacies as a husband, father and CEO are so well known. The past for poor Charles and his former failings, are not so much a foreign country, as the famous expression goes, but a painfully present millstone around his neck because of his son.
The death of the Queen was always going to trigger a nationwide public reassessment of the monarchy and its relevance in an age of TikTok, AI and on-demand Nando’s, but the tranche of damaging revelations and claims served up by the Sussexes have only made this much more acute.
Over the decades, the monarchy has repeatedly faced approval ratings bouncing all over the shop, like Fergie with a new spiraliser to sell. The greatest crisis in modern royal history came in 1997 when Diana, Princess of Wales was killed in Paris. In the weeks after her death, only 38 per cent of Brits thought the monarchy would survive.
Things very clearly improved, especially with the arrival of Kate and her wardrobe full of Zara tops and middle class mores, which is why as of December, 60 per cent of Britons thought the country should keep the monarchy.
Where things start to get tricky for Charles is when it comes to the young ‘uns. Notably support for the crown among 18-24-year-olds has steadily declined in recent years. In 2015, 69 per cent of that demographic said that the country should keep the monarchy, which sank to 47 per cent in 2018 and then from 2020 until the Queen’s death, that figure sat at 35 per cent, according to the Guardian.
Even with these declines, the Queen never faced placard-toting, shouting, antimonarchy sorts who had decided to spend a cold morning haranguing the sovereign in public.
Of course, we are a long way off having to start biting our nails as we fret about what Kate, the Princess of Wales and husband Prince William might do if they are turfed out of their grace-and-favour mansion by pitchfork-wielding commoners, and forced to get jobs. (I don’t think a gal with a second-class art degree and extensive experience shaking hands would be in high corporate demand.) The monarchy will chug along for decades yet.
But something is going to need to be done to arrest the downward slide in support in the months and years to come; to ensure the number of protesters who turn up at royal engagements are far outnumbered by flag-waving masses and to ensure that Camilla never has to find out what churrasco is. And something tells me that is very likely going to involve Kate having to stock up on a lot more work tops.
· Daniela Elser is a writer and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
